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Open Houses, Keyless Doors
At this time of year, each year, I grow tired of myself. I recognize this as a pattern. As winter reluctantly gives itself over to spring, I become tired of the way I look and act, the way I spend my time, the things I say, and the thoughts I think. I become tired of being me. I relate to the speaker in Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around,” excerpted here (W.S. Merwin’s translation is my favorite): "It happens that I am tired of being a man. / It happens that I go into the tailor's shops and the movies / all shrivelled up...."
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So Long, Friday Night Lights
Earlier this month, one of the best shows on television aired its final episode. A few friends and I huddled on a sofa to eat hamburgers and watch the series finale of Friday Night Lights—and I won’t lie, I grabbed a few extra napkins to use as tissue, just in case. Before the episode began we re-watched the pilot. I had forgotten that it closed with something rarely found in television nowadays—a prayer. And not just any prayer....
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The Beautiful Attitudes
I clearly remember the last day of being nine. I stood in front of my house on the porch, its cement stained from summer, when my brother and I felt through the thick fur of our chow chows for fat ticks that we plucked, shook off, then smashed with rocks. On the last day of being nine, I stood on the stained cement crying. I was upset because although the next day was my birthday and would bring all the extravagances of a birthday, I would be turning ten. As in, going from a one-digit age number to a two-digit age number. And I realized I wasn’t likely to reach the three-digits....
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Smoke Break
After I’ve peeled the plastic protective layer off the nicotine patch and am holding the flesh-colored circle above the actual, paler flesh of David’s forearm, careful not to touch the sticky medicated part with my fingers, I pause. He looks at me in the bathroom mirror, lips parted, dark eyes glinting. I think he’s panicking a little, wants to back out, but I’m wrong. “Let’s put it on the other arm, my left arm,” he says. “Just in case I have a reaction or something goes wrong and I have to have my arm amputated...."
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Poetry is Like...a Large Foam Dinosaur
In high school, when I first began approaching poetry as a craft to be honed, I assigned myself writing exercises on metaphor. My theory was this: a poem can be written that compares love to any other animal, vegetable, or mineral. The unlikelier the comparison, the more profitable the exercise. For example, love is a claw-footed bathtub. Love is a supermarket circular. Love is a hand grenade (that one’s easy). A similar claim can be made about poetry, that it lends itself easily to many, um, similes. A poem is like a rosebud, like Russian nesting dolls, like anything small and compact that contains multitudes....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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