Philip Gross – Palimpsest

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Philip Gross
Palimpsest

I heard the body whisper to the soul.
      This is the oldest of news
that stays news: any turn of the page
      can be a brink, a stumbled
step, the rupture of a vein, that sets
the compass needle in you spinning
      as if at the North Magnetic Pole,

nowhere… You come to in a library hush;
      you’re shelved between befores
and afterwords, between codex and scroll,
      skin to skin with the calf and the kid.
Like them, we are the corpus. Feel the flow
of text across your surface, as a cuttlefish
      might feel its shivering auroras.

And all those years you thought you were
      the story… Footnotes, at best.
Errata. Days, scratched out. Nights, itched
      into tatters by a question. Precious
vellum, though, was scraped and pumiced
back into use. Could you get to know, if not
      quite love, yourself as palimpsest,

not whole but… more so? Patched, gone
      threadbare or too faint to read,
still, the book is a life, a patient listening,
      the words, marks in the dust
of a suburban yard left by tumbleweed
end-over-ending away, the wind, never
      at rest on this earth, moving on.

Nancy Ludmerer – Chameleon

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Nancy Ludmerer
Chameleon

Two people in one week said I was a chameleon and on Monday morning I woke up and really was one. I didn’t need a mirror. When I found myself reduced to the size of a Meyer lemon, with 360-degree vision and a bumpy greenish physique, I knew. My double bed had been perfect for me and Sandy, the sweet cat who slept with me every night, his body curled into mine. Now that same bed was as immense and forbidding as an iceberg.
       I worried, not only about my transformation but about my precarious work situation. I finally had a law job that allowed me to pay the rent and then some. I saw from the bedside clock it was 7:30 am. I had a court-ordered deposition at nine and if I didn’t show, I would be held in contempt. My partner mentor (who wasn’t much of a mentor really) would be furious; I could be fired. Four months before, when I could no longer pay the rent on my studio apartment, I parlayed my law degree from a low-paying Legal Aid job to a law clerk position at a reasonably prestigious midtown firm. My ex-boyfriend telephoned when he heard (how he heard, I’m not sure) for the sole purpose of berating me. I had abandoned our shared ideals, he said, ignoring that he had abandoned me a year before. ‘You’re a chameleon. You blend in, in this case with a lot of careerist money-grubbing law grads.’
        ‘Adaptability is a good thing,’ I said. ‘You’re turning it into a negative.’ The truth is, I wasn’t all that adaptable. I hadn’t adapted well when he left me. I hated living alone, which is how Sandy–a cat made homeless by the storm of the same name–came into my life.
       From the time I was small, whenever we moved from one part of town to another or from one city to another, my parents said it was my job to make new friends. ‘Do I have to?’ I asked at seven and at ten and at thirteen, and they would look at me like I was someone else’s child. Had they not both departed this world, they would not be surprised to learn I was not making friends at the law firm. I was not surprised either. I was a decade older than most of the lawyers in my cohort, who all seemed to know the same people from NYU or Columbia. I had gone to Brooklyn Law School at night. When I told my therapist I was having a hard time fitting in, she asked, ‘What are you, a chameleon? You’re not expected to simply disappear into the woodwork.’
       I know what happened to me happened before–at least in literature–to Gregor Samsa, who turned into a giant bug. At first that made me feel less alone. But the more I dwelled on our similarities, the more fearful and unsettled I became. Gregor Samsa perished, freeing his family of the burden his life had become. What would happen to me?
       I didn’t want to die. Sandy was eyeing me hungrily. He could chew me to bits; no one would know. I would simply vanish. My new colleagues barely knew me. Legal Aid thought I copped out. My ex certainly wouldn’t care. To say I’d be forgotten was an understatement. My client and the judge would be mad at me for missing my court appearance; soon the case would be reassigned. My mentor would decide he had been right about me all along. My therapist would be perturbed and review her notes. She would bill me for missed visits, eventually resorting to a debt collection service.
       None of these people would come to my rescue. Instead, I was at the mercy of a cat, my cherished Sandy, who was no longer snuggled up next to me, but instead was stalking the strange little creature who had invaded his and his mom’s bed.
       Sandy, for a cat, was neither very big nor very small: twelve pounds of muscle, encased in soft, pliant, silky fur, mostly white but with orange splotches on his rear and a striped orange-and-white tail. There was an orange spot between his ears, too, which he loved to have stroked.
       If only I could reach out and stroke it now.
       Sandy’s eyes narrowed into dark broody pits. Without stopping to think, I extended one of my narrow green front feet and touched the orange spot between his ears. He jumped back and hissed. He had never hissed at me before, not at the shelter, not when I put him in the carrier, not when I brought him home. He stared for what seemed like a long time. His green irises glimmered and he blinked slowly, same as when I was human. Then he ducked his head and moved toward me. I stayed perfectly still. He bent his neck forward for a head butt. Now I placed both of my skinny front feet on that orange spot between his ears. How to reassure him this was a friendly gesture? He shook me off, but took one of my feet between his paws and began licking it, grooming me thoroughly and methodically, the same way he groomed my human fingers in the past–nails, cuticles, and joints.
       Gradually I felt an odd sensation. Slowly I was expanding. Sandy groomed me and then groomed me some more, all the way back to humanity, back to the flawed human being I was. Sandy recognized I was the creature who had saved him from homelessness regardless what my outer shell looked like. I was the opposite of a chameleon, whatever that might be called. I was his human mother, no matter how I appeared in the world.
       I checked the clock by my bedside. There was still time to make it to court. I dressed quickly, filled Sandy’s bowl, and left. At the courthouse I would find my client, defend his deposition, argue my case, win it or lose it.
       Who needs to make friends? When the day is over, I will return home–to my home, and Sandy’s.    AQ

Kimmy Chang – maculinea

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Kimmy Chang
maculinea

after my third molt,
i seep sweet, cloying chemicals—
a shimmering mist of deception,
marking me as kin.

soon, you appear—
appendages trembling—
dazed by my honeyed illusion.

i swell my thorax,
stroke your waxen limbs,
thrum a mimic’s aria
into your spiracles.

fooled, you cradle me
tenderly between mandibles
lover-like—

bearing me home,
deep within your dark nest
where i gorge greedily
on your eggs—fragile, yielding.

my body thickens,
lush, ravenous—
until tunnels echo emptily,
barren of future.

you kneel, reverent and blinded,
while i hang ghostlike,
woven in silken deceit.

until your cautious touch,
an antenna’s brush,
cracks my damp chrysalis—
splintering chitin.

i slip free—a birth cry slicing—
my wings unfurling gossamer,
filling empty tunnels
with fleeting cruelty, beauty.

you stand stunned, trembling,
searching in vain
for the queen i never was—

and the devotion
you should never have given.

Edward Michael Supranowicz – A Bad Day in Wonderland

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Edward Michael Supranowicz
A Bad Day in Wonderland

The artist writes: ‘I do not believe in formal artist statements. Art should speak for itself, and the artist should maintain a respectful distance and silence. I work intuitively and compulsively, probably believing that there are archetypes that are shared among us all, but amenable to being expressed in one’s own individual style.
       I have been doing digital paintings and drawings for the last 10 or so years. It is a good fit to my personality and nature, being able to go forward, then back, then back and forward, and not having to worry about wasted canvas. And digital work allows for sharing work with more than one person rather than just one person “owning” a painting.’

Edward Michael Supranowicz, A Bad Day in Wonderland, digital image, 2025

AQ43 – Metamorphosis

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Bryan R. Monte – AQ42 Spring 2025 Book Reviews

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Bryan R. Monte
AQ42 Spring 2025 Book Reviews

Philip Gross, The Shores of Vaikus, Bloodaxe Books, 2024, ISBN 978-1-78037-717-9, 95 pages.
Jean Huets, At the Fall Line, Getrude M Books, 2024, ISBN 978-1-939530-30-1, 308 pages.

Sometimes the old adage, ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’ just isn’t true. It certainly isn’t the case with Philip Gross’s new poetry book, The Shores of Vaikus, (Bloodaxe Books, 2024) nor with Jean Huets’s, At the Fall Line, (Gertrude M Books, 2024). The first book is a collection of poems and parables inspired by Gross’s father’s Estonian homeland. Its front cover features a panoramic view of the shore at Kasmir, Estonia. Prominent in this photo on the front cover are two erratic boulders, smoothed by being rolled hundreds of miles by glaciers and then deposited as these retreated and melted: a brilliant, geologic metaphor for the poetic process. On the back cover is distant, low shore with uniformly thick forests across a bay. The second is about the emotional, social, and economic tensions experienced by former Union officer, Louis Bondurant, who returns to Richmond, Virginia, (once the Confederate States of America’s capital), after the American Civil War. He finds himself in love with a married woman, and the poorly-paid foreman of a granite quarry his family formerly owned. Its cover features Winslow Homer’s dark, moody almost expressionist Moonlight on the Water, which, in just a few strokes, suggests two women by a river.
       However, The Shores of Vaikus is not only a beautiful object, but also a masterful collection of poems. Its first and last sections, entitled ‘Translating Silence’, consist of ‘free verse’ poems, in which Gross explores the dichotomies of the natural, political, and social worlds: at home and in exile, in presence and absence, and in sounds and silence. In the second section, entitled ‘Evi and the Devil’, are 214 Grimm’s fairy tale-like (the more adult, unexpurgated, violent versions) prose poems about the origins of the evil and the dark reality of the natural world.
       The book’s primary focus, as the cover and the book’s dedication reveals, is the poet’s father’s Estonian homeland. The first poem, ‘The Old Country’, takes up themes which will be examined throughout the book. It emphasizes the sounds, nature, and geography of this part of the world:

          The storm moved over last night
          letting the sea down again, the Baltic flatness
          slightly darkened,slightly darkened, with a battered look,

Gross’s attention is also drawn to small details, which makes these poems memorable. He mentions ‘The honey-tart tang of pine sap’ and, in the next stanza, observes ‘…this year’s new wasp/bent to it diligence, scraping a track in the wood’

He also mentions its cumulative effect on one’s memory:

          So little can stand for so much: that
          sound for log pile, for resin smell, for morning
          after, for that old, small country.

which he compares to how a “deep-dive camera’s eye/might catch a hundred-year-old-wreck’. Another poem, ‘Introits’, has images of contradiction and coexistent (im)possibilities symbolized by ‘…a bronze axe / thrown into forever / only yesterday / four thousand years ago.’
       There are also poems about the emigrant experience, the present absences in their lives and what they’ve left and will never return to even if it is the same place, because time changes everything and you’re not there to change with it. It is certainly a sentiment I can relate to having spent nearly half my life on a different continent from the one on which I was born.
       His poems also address the effect the individual has on history: as a surfer on ocean waves if one is lucky, or deformed and and/or crushed by the cruel, sharp tectonic shifts of history (as strong as the glaciers that rolled those erratic boulders hundreds of miles smooth) if one isn’t:

          rather than
          in the gunmetal neighbours
          brooding on the brittleness
          of empires how their fractured
                             edges can be honed
          to lacerate, that we are in the grip
          of larger shifts and flows than us
          is no surprise.

       The middle section of The Shores of Vaikus, entitled ‘Evi and the Devil’, is composed of 48 pages of 214 paragraph-long prose poems. In first sections, Evi, the main character, introduces herself by saying ‘When I was small, I ran away into the forest’. In the next section she seems to implicate herself as an arsonist: ‘Some mornings we found there had been another of those unexplained house fires at night.’ We also meet her relatives: her strict grandmother who frightens her, her uncle, who disappears in a latched (locked?) sauna, whom she reports was ‘Dissolved completely, just a puff of uncle-scented steam’ when she unlocked the door, a wicked great-grandfather who urges her to ‘Show ’em, girl, and don’t waste a stick of your tinder.’ Another victim is her teacher, Mrs. Tamm.

          ‘Every now and then, I broke a teacher. No harm meant, you under-
          stand. They were all two shrill, too brittle, the might shatter, splinters
          everywhere, people had to be warned.

       Evi broke the teacher by constantly looking over and above Mrs. Tamm’s shoulder, as if someone was behind the teacher. Evi reports: ‘she broke. Mind you, all the grownups felt like that in those days.’ perhaps an echo of Soviet surveillance culture.
       Evi also encounters a hermit, who comes to a bad end after Evi mentions the effluent emanating from his toilet outflow pipe, which makes the forest and the town stink. To rectify this, the hermit seals off the pipe, but he soon suffocates from his own toxic waste. (I guess he hadn’t heard of compost toilets or privies.)
       And of course, since these are fairy tale-like vignettes, the forest, trees, lakes, streams, and wind all have special powers—and Evi knows them. For example, she knows that ‘sudden round clearings in the forest…where the Devil squats, grandly to fart. Things wither’ She also sees ‘the dead unpeel the papery crust of non-existence, and step blinking into the sun.’ a very adept and rather novel description of resurrection. Here, Evi has many recurring encounters with the Devil as well as the Crane Beak Woman and the Glass Man.
       Sometimes these tales touch very close to historical and contemporary reality. For example, invasions of this flat land by the Vikings—‘First it was the raiders landing in their thin boats with their hungry disposition’, the Nazis “some terrible blond people … with ideals and uniforms and a loathing of darkness. The blonder they got, the darker the shadows behind them.’, and the Soviets, ‘The isle is full of notices, curt words explaining that the place beyond this point is not. Wires, suddenly, taut as zithers. Some hum.’—are all mentioned. (The last poem’s reference in particular to: ‘the place / beyond this point is not’ reminded me of a central East Berlin tourist map I purchased there in 1978. Where the Wall stood, was just a blank, white space at the edges of the map, as if there was also nothing there.) This collection of Estonian, fairy tale-like, micro prose poems create their own world and should spark the imagination of readers of any age.
       In the third section of The Shores of Vaikus, Gross explores the meanings of the Estonian word viakus in English. In fact, four of the five poems in this section have the word vaikus in their titles. The first poem, ‘Now in Vaikus’ explains how the history and landscape are interrelated, how they lead to what was (and for some larger countries still is), ‘A landscape hard to defend,’ which lead to it being contested and conquered by ‘Finnish, Russians, Swedish, (and) Germans’ armies, but is also still a favourite place for ‘migrating birds…in the reed beds’. However, Gross describes how easy it is to hide in the Estonian countryside:

          Even in a tiny country
          There’s a kind of a forest that goes on forever.

          You drive for an hour
          on a straight road, straight and flat.
          You will never reach a rise to see beyond.

       The next poem, ‘A Monument in Vaikus’ describes the Occupation Memorial in Maarjamaë, Tallinn, composed of ‘two walls / of glass black marble…(in) A trench’ similar in design to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Near the close of this poem, the poet admits:

          I can’t conceive of music
          it would be more right to sound here
          than to stand
          without a note

       A few lines later, he admits that he seeks ‘To write some bars / of that un-music / but in words. The impossibility of describing human history and suffering in mere words.
       Next ‘Five Versions of Vaikus’ are a set of five short poems about the different types of Estonian silence. Valgus vaikus is a light silence, sipelgat vaikus is ant silence. jänesekapse vaikus is rabbit cabbage silence, hanede vaikus is geese silence, and vaikiminie is silence itself. Gross uses metaphors from the natural world to describe each of these unique silences. These are also possibly linked to his spiritual practice as a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which encounters God or wisdom in mystical silence. The book ends with ‘Another Shore’, as the poet observes with pleasure the aerial acrobatics of a swifts (in the UK?) in ‘the late July evening’ as they ‘cut through’ (the sky)…‘polishing the edges of space, with finer, finer abrasions.’
       Jean Huets’s At the Fall Line is also a handsome book that is propelled by the twists and turns of intrigue, where enemies ultimately turn out to be friends, and vice versa. It revolves around Louis Bondurant, a civil war veteran living in his hometown, Richmond, Virginia, as he seeks love, justice, and a place for himself to start over again. The novel’s action is illuminated throughout by passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and is a real page turner, depicting the difficult transformation of a Southern society in transition. For example, it describes how some former slaves now work as servants in their former masters’/mistress’s houses, while others leave for out West to homestead. War veterans, most with some sort of physical and mental disabilities, are scattered about town. Some are drunks, some mental wrecks, and almost all are finding it hard to adjust to life after their home region’s defeat. In addition, most of At the Fall Lines’s action, (with the exception of the short epilogue), takes place from February to October 1869, giving the narrative a compressed, tense feeling. Huets also contrasts Bondurant’s life in Richmond with that of his younger brother’s in New Haven, (Bondurant moved his family North to New England during the war), where Jacob studies at Yale.
       The novel begins with an outing to a quarry, into which the Bondurant’s love interest’s niece falls to her death. This tragedy sets the tone for the rest of the novel in which Bondurant struggles to regain the quarry, which was stolen from his father through financial chicanery, while painfully navigating the world as a disabled veteran. For Bondurant, who was shot in the hip in a battle, walking and transport by horseback and carriage is difficult and painful. He also experiences episodes of PTSD, which are just as vividly described as Stephen Crane’s battlefield scenes, and survives an assassination attempt by an unknown assailant. The novel also includes realistic, but non-pornographic, references to clandestine love making, a prelude to gunfight that the protagonist defuses, and Richmond residents’ persistent prejudices and problems that have survived the war’s monumental bloodshed. Huets’s extensive research at local, state, and national libraries and archives, plus her interviews with Paul Wood, author of Tools and Machinery of the Granite Industry, brings to life the world of her characters, making At the Fall Line’s relations, situations, and conflicts truly engaging.     AQ

Lee Fraser – How To Be a Field Linguist

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Lee Fraser
How To Be a Field Linguist

Study for years. Research transport, insurance, medical,
visas, weather, for months. Receive going-away gifts
like stuffed toy versions of your national icon,
waterproof notebooks, pens that can write in space.

Judge other expats on the plane: pierced men in shorts,
women whose hair and thighs aren’t tucked away.
Clearly learned less local etiquette for their holiday
week than you did for your two-year assignment.

Encounter city stint dissonance: you prepped for
fire-lighting, stream bathing, malaria prophylaxis,
phonemes, syllable boundaries, minimal pairs, not
fraudsters, uncovered skin boils, mortifying potholes.

Travel to your village: six-seater plane, eight-seater
15-seated van, back of truck, now we’re talking.
Be heartily received. Discover boils walking past
in the village too. Find you love super-sweet milky tea.

Learn how dental deficits, chicken noise and
dictaphone flies skew data. Lament hard pencils on
limp paper, soft pencils on high-use paper beneath
sunscreen arms. Mouldy line-faded clothes. Lice. Ants.

Wrestle antipassives, allophones, aspect, adjectives,
absolutives, all so clear in textbooks and whiteboards
four flights from here. Regret regifting the toy. Wish
the space pen was a thermometer. Find you dislike this tea

until it dawns that your neighbours have saved your skin,
assignment, life, a dozen times; stammer like the preschooler
that you are, Thank you; you are so good, and clever,
and slow with me. Have another cup of tea together.

Rebecca Heath Anderson – Alligator Godzilla Mass

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Rebecca Heath Anderson
Alligator Godzilla Mass

This is an excerpt from a piece about my family’s experience with frontotemporal dementia. FTD’s symptoms are often mistaken for personality changes rather than the markers of a devastating disease that includes major behavioral changes and the loss of language. By sharing our stories, we shed light on an illness that deserves greater awareness, compassion and research.

My mom flew halfway around the planet just to embarrass me, I thought as I picked her up at Kansai International Airport. Except for her shoes, she’d draped herself entirely in varying shades of green: a pilled, musty smelling forest green sweater, olive jeans she had dyed herself, and neon socks so bright I flicked my sunglasses on and off in exaggerated jest before we hugged for the first time in a year.
      In truth it was a miracle that either of us ever made it to Japan.
      ‘Well, the stars must have aligned,’ she said in her thick Wisconsin accent as we boarded the bus from Osaka to Yonago, the rural town where I was teaching English. I’d been working since I was 15, but this was my first ‘real-real’ job, and she was visiting to celebrate my 24th birthday and see the cherry blossoms. I was sure she’d heard that phrase—stars aligning—from the psychic she visited weekly with Donna, her cashier colleague back at the local hardware store, Kitz & Pfeil.
      By ‘thick accent’, think Frances McDormand in Fargo (‘Oh, don’tchya know’); frequently mistaken for a Canadian (‘…Er, no?’ tacked on to the end of every sentence, including direct statements); and add in an extra ‘y’ randomly into words. She spoke in a dialect only innately understood by her five siblings raised on a dairy farm outside of Weyauwega, and could turn a simple hello into an eight-syllable question.
      I was worried about more than her attire on this visit. We hadn’t seen each other since the previous summer when she helped me pack for my move. We had been sitting in her tiny living room in Menasha, surrounded by the mountains of crap I’d trekked back from Madison after graduation. I had never been out of the country before yet had waited to sort and pack until almost the very night before flying out. The puzzle of what I’d even need to bring for two years in a foreign country overwhelmed me, plus, I’d been too preoccupied with cultivating a growing collection of boyfriends. My mom was pissed–jyust pyisst–that I’d left things for the last minute again, but not so mad that she didn’t keep offering to take a smoke break with me or play a quick round of rummy.
      ‘Now, do they have stores in Japan, er no?’ she asked after she played her hand and discarded.
      ‘Do you mean a certain type of store?’ I asked.
      ‘Noooo, like, can you buy things when you live there?’ she asked again, leaning forward while exhaling a plume of smoke from her Salem Light 100. I looked around the smokey room, my eyes resting on her Toshiba TV, and over to the pack of Fuji disposable cameras we’d bought together earlier that day. Trying to keep condescension out of my voice, I answered, ‘Yes, they do have stores there.’
      As I crossed items off my packing list, we chatted, and she continued to pepper me with questions about a place I’d never been yet but was aching to get to. I wanted to start my life as far away as I could.
      ‘Now, do they have sex in Japan?‘ she asked conspiratorially as she lit one of her thousand candles, like it was some great mystery of the universe.
      ‘Mom.’
      ‘What? Do they? Don’t you want to know?’ she asked.
      ‘Mom. Jesus Christ. How do you think Japanese people exist?’ My patience had left the room. So had hers.
      ‘God fucking dammit, Rebecca, STYOP using the Lord’s name in vain!’ she yelled while angrily taping together a box for me. In a calmer voice, and mostly to herself, she added, ‘I meant, do they talk about sex.’
      Our relationship was steady in its oscillation between warmth and startling volatility, as though we were two-step dancers attempting to fling each other right off the face of the earth with each spin, but unable to let go. We had even gone long spans of time not speaking to each other at all. The once sporadic and short-lived silent treatments had matured into a yearlong gag order before the beginning of my first year away at college. I remember the deep sadness of that time, feeling unmoored while all my friends’ parents packed up station wagons and helped them move into the dorms, and I was on my own, figuring out how I would afford to eat.
      My mom and I had both come from a long line of first-born daughters held together by the middle name Ruth but not much else. I was the first female in my family to go to college, and I thought at the time that she had lit my financial aid FAFSA paperwork on fire out of pure jealousy. This was in the late ’90s, before everything was online. I’m told that when my parents were still married, their deal had been that my mom would first work to pay for my dad to go to tech school, and afterward, he would pay for her to go. They divorced before she could claim her due, and she was left uneducated, raising three children under the age of five all by herself.
      I can clearly picture the burning rage in her eyes as she holds the packet of FAFSA forms I so desperately need her to sign, her blue Bic lighter fanning across the edges, the flames catching and edging upward before she throws the remnants in the sink and turns the faucet on, the ink and embers gurgling down the drain. As clear as this image appears now, I cannot truly remember if she only threatened to burn the papers, or if she did in fact burn them. I know with certainty that I requested a new batch of forms and filled them out myself, forging her signature easily, with the looping ‘R.’ in the middle matching my own.
      ‘She probably burned them, Becca,’ my younger sister says. I ask why, and she reminds me that this happened around the same time as the ‘shearing-scissors-balloon-popping-Mother’s-Day-incident’. I hadn’t been home for that event but can feel the longing in the pit of my sister’s stomach when she says the word byalloon, the same sorrow I feel when I hear the word pyaperwoork. We hear these words always in mom’s voice: the long vowels, the extra syllables and extra ‘y’s, and the loss. My older brother has completely blocked these years, but I’m sure there are certain words that could make him flinch, too.
      My mom and I had slowly inched our way back to each other in the proceeding years after the year of silence, and her vacation to visit me in Japan was her big olive branch. Maybe that was why she had dyed her jeans and drenched herself in green. I knew how much this trip was a sacrifice for her. It meant two weeks of unpaid time away from her minimum-wage job at Kitz & Pfeil, plus the cost of the flight, train tickets, food and spending money. When you live well below the poverty line, a regular trip like this can cost almost a half year’s wages.
      ‘It feels like you won the lottery,’ I said as we found our seats on the bus to Yonago and settled in for the three-hour journey. She looked out the window for a long while as the Osaka cityscape gave way to mountains. ‘Well,’ she hesitated. ‘Donna and I went up to Oneida.’ There it was. Gambling. A new one in her repertoire of addictions. When I didn’t respond, she added hopefully, ‘And I can pay off your credit card?’
      I rested my head on her shoulder, and she tilted to rest her head on the top of mine. Nestled in together and holding hands, I told her all about the time I panicked when my students crawled out the window and ran away during class; I shared the cultural mistakes to avoid, such as sticking your chopsticks upright into a bowl of rice, as it’s bad luck when done anytime other than during funerary rites; and, I begged her not to ask my boss Matsumoto-sensei, who would be our tour guide for part of the trip, any stupid questions. Do Japanese people have sex? Pffft.
      ‘Now, does Matsutsi have a family, er no?’ she sat up and asked.
      ‘It’s Ma-tsu-mo-to,’ I said, ‘and call him Sensei.’
      ‘That’s what I said, Myatsuuuutsiiii.’ She frowned, realizing what she’d said, and then laughed. I felt embarrassed for how loudly we were laughing on the bus, the Japanese salary men next to us trying to sleep, with Asahi Shimbun newspapers covering their faces.
      I brought my voice back down to a whisper while teaching her important phrases she’d need. ‘Arigato gozaimasu,’ I sounded out slowly for her. Thank you very much. ‘Now you try.’
      ‘Alligator Godzilla Mass,’ she said proudly.
      I slowed it way down, having her repeat each syllable after me.
      ‘A.’
      ‘Aaaah,’ she repeated.
      ‘Ri.’
      ‘Reeeee.’
      ‘Ga.’
      ‘Gyaaa.’
      ‘To.’
      ‘Toh.’
      ‘Now put it together: arigato,’ I encouraged her.
      ‘Alligator,’ she responded.
      Much of her trip is a blur to me now. When I flip through the photo album, my breath catches at the beauty of the flower arrangement we made together for a city-wide showcase, and I’m surprised by how young she looks, how similar my jawline today looks like hers profile in the photo of us kneeling together during a tea ceremony. I worry if I will become her, or already have. Like a flipbook animation, I see us moving from a day at Kaike beach on the coast of the Sea of Japan, to smiling together outside of Matsue Castle with ‘Matsutsi’ as our guide, (yes, she called him that), to picnicking during the cherry blossom festival, with Mt. Daisen ablaze in the sunset.
      It’s only half the story. If I were to turn the animation flipbook over and flick through the backside of the pages, we’d also see her crumpled in a crying tantrum on the sidewalk outside of a bustling, loudly pinging pachinko parlor, acting as a toddler, hanging onto my leg and refusing to leave unless I’d let her gamble. And, after enjoying an elaborate meal prepared by my new British boyfriend–now husband–we’d see her yanking me aside and whispering harshly, ‘If I were you, I’d ask him, ‘Hey, what the hyell are you hiding from me?”’ I ask what she means, and she shrugs, “Men just aren’t thyat nice.”
      On the last full day of her trip, my birthday, I’d arranged for us to stay at an onsen–a Japanese hot spring resort–and overnight in a ryokan, a traditional tatami room with futons on the floor instead of Western beds. I wanted to share with her what I’d come to love about Japan: the calming aesthetics, the deep relaxation of soaking in lavender scented pools, and the peace of living within strict constraints and rules. Slow purposeful movements. Grace. No volatility.
      As we undressed in the onsen’s changing room, I explained that swimming suits weren’t allowed. Before entering the baths, we’d need to first wash ourselves in a methodical way, sitting on a low bench, ladling water from a bucket as we lathered first our private areas and then the rest of our bodies. “Oh, we both get to be in our birthday suits today!” she said joyously. An old obaasan grandmother coughed lightly, and I shushed my mom.‘We have to be quiet in here. Whispering only. No running. No swimming.’ I was trying to avert my gaze away from her as we washed, but noticed she was the one staring at everyone else, her mouth gaping open. ‘And no staring, it’s not polite.’
      She tried bringing her towel into the bathing area and was baffled when I said no, she must return it to the changing area–regular towels aren’t allowed in this sacred space, only a tiny washcloth you can place atop your head.
      While she returned her towel, I stepped into the medium temperature bath first, wanting to cover myself. It was the largest bath, and empty, and the best temperature before trying out the much hotter and then the freezing pools. Even the temperature of the baths had a precise, natural order to them, designed to relax your muscles like a deep-tissue water massage. Outside of the large window, the cherry trees in the curated Japanese garden flickered in the dusky wind; a blossom fell and floated in the outdoor pool.
      When she came back into the steamy baths area, I raised my forefinger to my mouth and gestured for her to enter quietly. She began to skip and then actually jumped into that bath, splashing me purposefully and laughing. ‘Mom!’ I whisper-yelled. She started to float on her back, her nipples and pubic hair rising above the water line. I looked away, not wanting to see her in all her nakedness and not wanting to catch anyone’s eyes and definitely not wanting to be kicked out. I overheard two Japanese ladies whisper, ‘Gaijin.’ Foreigners. I’d had to get special permission even to attend this onsen as a gaijin with two tattoos–a double taboo, and here she was acting like a little kid.
      She rolled over in the water into a breaststroke, and like a frog fanning out its front and hind legs, she glided across the bath with a huge smile splashed across her face. It might be the only time I’ve ever seen her truly have fun.   AQ

Angela Williams – The City’s River of Flotsam and Jetsam

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Angela Williams
The City’s River of Flotsam and Jetsam

I
You are just a girl from the provinces thinking you can study art in the Big Smoke. Pah! And you had the audacity to throw me in the bin. Now you will never find your way home in this labyrinthine city because the name of the station you need to get back to is printed on me. I liked the darkness in your pocket, snuggling up against the Polo mints you gave to your horse back home who misses and needs you. People chuck their cellophane sandwich wrappers and Coke cans on top of me and we all join the city’s river of flotsam and jetsam. You will regret abandoning me. Think the A-Z will help you out? The place you are searching for is always right on its pesky crease.

II
We try to dissuade you by pinching your toes but we have no option and are forced to pound the streets towards Paddington. Our soles sink when we stop outside that dirt-cheap place on the second floor of a building that looks like it should have been demolished in the previous century. The landlord’s green sweater is mottled with gravy. Our Cuban heels clickety-clack up the bare stairs behind him. The man opens the bedsit door and stretches out his arm, like a ringmaster introducing his star acrobat. He is proud of the cracked mirror and the candlewick bedspread with a stain the shape of Italy and asks if you are a nurse, just because you wear a wide elasticated belt called a cinchy. He says you could stay rent-free if he could visit you from time to time. We run back down the stairs leaving flea-bitten despair behind us. A well-timed leap gets us on a red Routemaster heading to a better part of London. From the bus stop we go up a steep hill in the rain, our suede uppers are soaked and stretched so that we cannot protect your feet any longer.

III
Those VD-riddled chaps, the secessionists inspired my architect. The relief carving of ivy and lilies on my facade invites you in. You flump down on a velvet banquette and smooth out the list of possible student digs made almost illegible from the rain. A waitress sets steaming coffee on your table, a shortbread biscuit balanced on the saucer. My warm exhaled breath relaxes you. You deserve a break from the hunt. You can come back to me whenever student life makes you sad and lonely. Remember, I gave you refuge on that day you were thinking of giving up on your venture; believing that lifting your head above the parapet of small-town life was going to break you. I will always nourish you, even on lonely Sundays, come in for my roast dinners and tea and a slice. I may look all haughty from outside but inside I am a true taste of home. After all, isn’t that what you are searching for?     AQ

Bryan R. Monte – Lunar/Venusian Conjunction

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Bryan R. Monte
Lunar/Venusian Conjunction

For many years, I have provided photographs for Amsterdam Quarterly’s websites. Most have been scenes shot in Amsterdam or in other places in The Netherlands with a Canon SX130 IS PowerShot camera. Increasingly, however, I have used my iPhone SE2022 camera for scenes that appear and disappear suddenly, such as this conjunction of the moon and the planet Venus taken during a momentary break in the clouds. This photo was taken in January 2025 at ISO 800, 141 mm, and f1.8.

Bryan R. Monte, Lunar/Venusian Conjunction, photograph, 2025