the brown literary review · the brown literary review volume iii, issue ii spring 2010 editor jeff...

The Brown Literary Review

Volume 3Issue 2

Spring 2010

Providence, RI

the Brown Literary Review

The Brown Literary ReviewVolume III, Issue ii

Spring 2010

Editor Jeff SanfordAssociate Editors Henry Peck, Isabel Parkes, Eli Schmitt, Emily Martin

Contributing Editor Colette GarriguesCopy Review Jonah Wolf, Pablo Larios, Candice Chu

Design Jeff Sanford

The Brown Literary Review publishes the literature of Brown University writers on a semesterly basis. Contributions are considered from undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and alumni/ae. Submission deadlines are October 10th for the fall issue and March 5th for the spring issue. Please forward all submissions or inquiries to [email protected]. No simultaneous submissions to other publications please.

Please see brownliteraryreview.wordpress.com for more information.

The editors extend their thanks to the Creative Arts Council. Without CAC funding, this publication would not be possible. Our thanks also go to

Printed by Brown Graphic Services © Brown Literary Review, 2010

[cac]CREATIVE ARTS COUNCIL

BROWN UNIVERSITY

The Brown Literary Review

Providence, RI

Spring 2010

~An undergraduate publication since 2005 ~

Volume 3Issue 2

Contents

1

8

24

26

31

32

33

38

40

“Notes on Surveillance” by Colette Garrigues

“Bruce Springsteen misreads...” by Sam Alper

“Optical Illusions” by Alexandra Regenbogen

“Still-Life for Estelle” by Colette Garrigues

Two poems by Michael Gizzi

“One God” by Bill Berkson

“Census” by Rachel Arndt

“Homage to Matisse” by Janet Zong

“Thumb” by Michael Sunshine

SPRING 2010 | 1

Colette GarriguesNOTES ON SURVEILLANCE

GARRIGUES

(from Writing in the Family)

Morning at 1 Cooper Morris Drive: I set an alarm for early, for the grey hours when the house would sift down into its foundation again and I could stand to myself on the hardwood panels. The mattress was old, purchased for my mother when she was old enough for a big girl bed. Now her mother Shirley lies face-up in the next room eyes snapped open like they’d never seen the ceiling before. Or in a fetal curl, brittle limbs folded into belly button.

(We were eating oatmeal in the kitchen when she hit upon the first dead end: eyes unlit but for microwave glare, caught in the headlights of a Minotaur. She snapped to and put the bowl back in, took it out cooked through for a second time. Now she stops short every fifteen seconds or fewer and Daedalus is hard at work to patch the holes with brick and mortar.) When we slipped her nightie to the tiles she was all skin and shit-stain and hair, black and wiry except for bald spots and the tufts of white on her crown. No shame and no words yet, only that wild look while she tried to hold the whole English language behind her teeth. The bathroom was all baby blue and steel bars and a plastic chair in the shower for me to sponge her down, and by towel time she’d be flailing and jabbering and sometimes I’d have to call Sumner in to help change her diaper (“We call them panties” he said soft, as if afraid of her hearing). Old people are different from outdoor cats that mat up and curl up and crawl away somewhere to die. More like infants with decaying body parts, their being there fills up the whole house.

§

Considering space and life expectancy, good help is near impossible to find. In this day and age no one wants to care for the elderly, not when

2 | BROWN LITERARY REVIEW

the elderly are this old anyway. For a while no one could find anyone to look after Sumner and Shirley so we took turns keeping watch. Finally we found Dahlia, who stayed in the guest room until my mother found her out for stealing. In truth, I can’t think why anyone would want to care for someone else’s parents— but, then again, I never did care for babysitting. There are always so many of my own kind to look after, and I’m still learning how to take care of myself.

Keep both eyes open.

§

Always have your wits about you.

My wits have a tendency to run wild, even now, no longer enough of a child to warrant constant surveillance. Anyway, I’ve surveilling of my own to do (to do: check up on accounts for saving and checking, book keep, keep up with the books…). Still my mother’s got her hands full at home, never was one to nest empty. For instance, with the credit card bills. Her father Sumner has an American Express Gold Card for when the bill comes, when he and Shirley take their meals out. Home-cooked is no longer an option, so they like to sit someplace where the people know them there. They like to sit with their feet propped up and watch Dr. Phil. Which is fine (something their daughter had to come to terms with: my father, the Harvard grad) until the show takes a short break. Then one of those infomercials airs—with the toll-free number, ten minutes and counting until the offer expires—and Sumner will reach for the phone. He’s purchased senseless, to the point of no return: Subscriptions to TV Guide, People Magazine, Reader’s Digest, renewed until the year 2020. Subscriptions to monthly savings memberships, vacation packages, pills for pain and weight loss, delivered daily by the bottle. Alteril, sleep well tonight. All for his daughter to sort through the month after, highlighter nosing after suspicious records. Like when she found the card had been charged to the caregiver’s name, Mrs. Dahlia Ross, for Internet wired to an apartment.

§

GARRIGUES

SPRING 2010 | 3

GARRIGUES

And, truth is, Sumner is not altogether impotent. He takes the bait, attaches to things. Like when his sister-in-law died (they never did get along) and we had to dismantle the whole apartment. And every time it got brought up Sumner would say: You better get my rug back from Estelle’s place. It was his to begin with, his mother’s before him, oriental with red roses, and he has no use for it now but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s a matter of ownership and overstepped boundaries. Draw a line down the middle so you can see what’s mine. Like the summer after Estelle died, when all us near-grown grandkids stopped by her old place under the pretense of helping out. Really, though, to take stock of the estate. A couch, a coffee table. Most of it not worth holding on to. Glass jars stuffed with one dollar bills—“money saved from quitting cigarettes”—upwards of 200 Alcoholics Anonymous tokens, tiny wine bottles empty, like the kind they serve on airplanes. §

I am told Estelle could hold her weight in liquor, and since she weighted anywhere between 120 and 180 pounds no one could attest to how many glassfuls she had thrown back on any given day. Her sister Shirley who would order a Beefeater gin with dinner, then tip onto her husband’s shoulder and sigh, “I’m such a lightweight.” At the time her daughter, my mother, did not account for the fact that she had been sipping from the cabinet at home. Estelle, though, proved more upfront about her addictions. Since there was no Weight Watchers Center in Brooklyn she took the subway into midtown twice a week for the weekly meetings. The morning after my parents’ wedding her eyes were swollen shut and she could not remember whether or not there had been a scene. So her better half saw to it that she was sober for the next 26 years. Quit cigarettes after half a lifetime of chain-smoking. Though, in the end, that did not stop them from pollarding her body parts. In the middle of all this, my mother, who armed herself against those kinds of compulsions that run in the family. Still she is the recipient of genetic inheritance, caught her own lump early enough so they could scoop it out without having to put her through chemo and radiation and all the rest. (At the age of 8 I ate peas one at a time.) But, of course, she could only suit her children in armor for so


long. Was not there to stop me from walking in on my great aunt who was napping in my room, lungs hooked up, wig slung over the bedpost.

* * *

In an email on October 18, my mother wrote my brother and me.

It was titled, “Our Visit.”

Dear darling Colette and Miles,

The house is eerily quiet, and the rooms straight, on this Sunday evening in the wake of your visit home. I want you both to know how much pleasure it brings me to care for you, cooking, cleaning, driving, laundering, consulting, catching up. I found myself thinking often of Grandma this weekend, believe it or not, she was once a SuperMom, cooking, cleaning, driving... I spoke to Grandpa this evening, and he sounds sad. Maybe you could give him a call, his lot is hard, caring for Grandma, and it’s getting harder. His number is 772-287-6878. I hope you return to school feeling renewed, having slept in your bed, eaten good food, spent time with the cat. Know that you are welcome home any time, it doesn’t have to be a holiday or school break. Love to you both. -Mom

My mother mothers like she writes: with precision, self-aware, word by word (or Bird by Bird), and she’s received acclaim for both. Scribner published her first book. About writing. And mothering. It’s called Writing Motherhood. So, in some ways, it’s about me. And, in other ways, it’s about the fact that I think it’s about me. Because the life of a mother is about other things too. Not everything is about you, you know. (To be honest, I’ve never been able to read it all the way through.) But that’s what I gathered when, after the book deal, she dog-eared those pages where my name appeared and asked me to sign off on her version of the story.

§

To begin with, the way I would have said it:

GARRIGUES

SPRING 2010 | 5

GARRIGUES

The room had six walls. My mother could not stand to expose me to sunlight so she drew the shades and crawled into bed. They’ve come up with a name for that now. “Postpartum” is everything that comes after. Scientists used to assume that the deep sea was unfit for life forms, so they’ve had to account for all sorts of unexpected species in recent years. Unconscious to color, the bottom-most bottom-feeders feed on particles that descend from the phonic zone. Fish food and the occasional whale carcass. We sifted down with the food fall. Sooner or later every child must learn that there are more stars than grains of sand. The threat of riptides, or getting dragged out to sea. Of course, some can’t catch on quickly enough. And a few infants simply refuse to take suck. (Signs of dehydration include cold feet, excessive fussiness, sunken eyes and fontanels.) “Her tear ducts looked like tiny raisins.” Even now the atmosphere after a fluorescent bulb is too bright. “She opened her eyes for the first time in an incubator.” The ring of light around a luminous body is caused by a thin cloud, water droplets or ice. They know more about the moon than the deepest parts of the ocean. That sort of buoyancy permits exploration. But here, now, we begin again: four walls, one word at a time.

§

Not to mention the position I’m in. The fact that this has all been written before. The forward to my mother’s first book:

The day I came home from the maternity ward at New York Hospital to my apartment on 85th and West End Avenue I drew down the blinds, crawled into bed, and hid under the covers with my newborn baby. We stayed there for two weeks.

My mother has told this story how many times over. How at first it thrashed in the dark, curdled on the page. How now it’s taken on a voice of its own, out loud, for the rest of everyone to read. For the most part, I like to hear her tell this story, the story of my birth. It helps, I think, to keep things together. What with all this dismantling. What with all this decay. It helps that my mother has something to hold in her hands, that they keep printing more copies, now that her children have left the house.


§

[Notes to Kinds of Surveillance]

I set out with the intent to revise this piece, starting with the first page, “Morning at 1 Cooper Morris Drive…” But, after a subsequent reading, I have decided not to. Since it is as near-perfect as it will ever be. At the sentence-by-sentence level that is.

Q: How do you eat an Elephant?

A: One bite at a time.

(I’m pretty sure my grandfather said that.) You see, this piece has already been revised, the “revision process” being inevitably imbedded in the “writing process.” Although the first sentence is still not quite sitting right with me. For instance, at some point I changed the first word from “Mornings” to “Morning,” to make the whole thing a little more immediate, but also to deaden the implication that this event was some sort of regular occurrence, that it happened more than once, because, truth be told, it did not really happen at all. At least, not in the actual space of real-life happenings. Or at least not entirely to me. But no happening belongs to entirely one person anyway, especially not when one person or other starts to write about it.

To start with, “I set an alarm” implies that I set an alarm, which I did not, because I have not slept over at my Grandparents’ house at any point in the near-past, not since I was little (when they were looking after me), and certainly not to look after them. So, yes, the mattress was old, my mother’s old mattress, but I did not sleep on it, so I was not there when my grandmother woke up in the morning, wakes up in the mornings, with that look in her eye, which I only know about from when she wakes up from an afternoon nap, after the two of them watch TV on the couch and she sort of keels over and we let her sleep there for a while, until she wakes up and can’t remember any of anything, can’t recall where she is. Which brings me to the bit about her nighty, which I have never seen her in. Because when she falls asleep for a nap on the

GARRIGUES

SPRING 2010 | 7

couch she is fully clothed. But the part about the panties is true—“We call them panties,” he said—though my grandfather said that to my mother, his daughter, not to me.

So, really, there is only one part of all this that is true, in the sense that it happened to me directly, happened with me there, did not take place to the second, third, fourth degree, tangentially, lyrically, for the sake of convenience or dramatic effect. The part to do with instant oatmeal: when she, Shirley, forgetting the instant before for the first time in my presence, took it out of the microwave and put it in again. And even though that part is true, I did regard Wikipedia after writing it, to make sure I had the facts down right, the relation of Daedelus to the Minotaur. Also factual, though far more crude (indeed, I worry that certain family members might take offense): the comparison of old people to outdoor cats, to the oldest of the two, Big Woo, who had the dignity to disappear one night so that we’d know that she was gone.

GARRIGUES


Characters: LUCE - Male. 52. OPRAH - Female. 17. AXL - Male. 25.

Bruce Springsteen Misreads the National Mood... was first performed at the Production Workshop of Brown University in October of 2009 under the direction of Michelle Snyder.

Original Cast: LUCE - Simon Wood, class of 2012 OPRAH - Lily Garrison, class of 2010 AXL - Rafael Cebrian, class of 2011

[A middle class American living room with the back wall ripped out. Ripped right out with jagged pieces of wood and broken glass. You can see the sky.] [Stage right is a couch and LUCE’s favorite chair. Stage left is a much smaller kitchen area.] [Circumstances are sad for these people. But language is fun.] [LUCE is in his favorite chair. He wears a big grey sweatshirt. He is looking out the back at the sky.] [The sky is cloudy.] [OPRAH comes downstairs in tiny shorts and t-shirt. She lays down on the couch.]

ALPER

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN MISREADS THE NATIONAL MOOD IN HIS HALFTIME PERFORMANCE

Sam Alper

SPRING 2010 | 9

LUCE Thas you Oprah? OPRAH Yeah. LUCE Make em eggs. OPRAH No way hell.

LUCE [Heavy breath.]

OPRAH No way hell. I’m working on my poems today, I don’t have time to cook for you.

LUCE You’ve got time for both. There’s hours in the day.

OPRAH If I make you eggs I gotta pour you juice.

LUCE Juice takes no time to pour. Juice takes gravity time.

OPRAH If there’s no juice I gotta go to the store.

LUCE We got juice.

OPRAH If the stores burned down I gotta pluck some kinda tree.


OPRAH I had a dream that was the strangest dream. I feel like a storm drain. My head hurts.

LUCE You going to school today?

OPRAH No way hell.


OPRAH My dream was so strange I gotta tell ya.

ALPER


[LUCE picks up a newspaper.]

OPRAH You listening?

LUCE Yeah.

OPRAH Really?

LUCE Yeah.

OPRAH You’re not reading the paper?

LUCE No.

OPRAH I’m not going to look. Because my head hurts.

LUCE Don’t look.

OPRAH You promise dad?

LUCE [Heavy breath]. [LUCE puts down the paper.]

OPRAH I was watchin’ clouds by a window. I was in a college. I was a student in the oldest college in the west and I had books and five cardigans and at night my air purifier at the foot of the bed blew up under my sheets and tickled my feet and sometimes it got cold for months and I drank coffee near books and dust and books and I waited for spring and went to rooms wallpapered against the rules and drank ten dollar wine. I drank with boys like sleepy bears in flannel and we all had blogs and some nights I wouldn’t even go to the rooms I’d just sit with my clean silver computer in my clean room that was all a mess and read the boys blog posts and each one had their own personality. And I had my own personality, all my own and I knew it just looking at my blog I knew just who I was and who they were and I could give you five songs and a favorite pair of shoes that said it. Every one of us. And one night we burrowed down into a snowdrift. We were all bundled up and exploring and we found the biggest snowdrift. We burrowed down and down and made ourselves a cave and fell asleep all over

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 11

each other like a family of bears.

LUCE I don’t want you sleeping with boys.

OPRAH They weren’t really like boys. They were like family bears.

LUCE I don’t want you sleeping with family bears.

OPRAH [hand on head] Oh I feel so awful.

LUCE Why?

OPRAH I woke up all alone. I felt like a Snickers wrapper. I felt like a book with the pages cut out for smuggling.

LUCE Write a poem about it.

OPRAH Shuddup.

LUCE Make an egg about it.

OPRAH Quit.

[A pause.]

LUCE I’ve got an interview.

OPRAH For a job?

LUCE Yeah.

OPRAH What kind?

LUCE CostCo.

OPRAH Oh.

LUCE Axl’s coming over. I’m going to borrow his truck.

ALPER


OPRAH No bus?

LUCE Bus stopped running.

OPRAH When?

LUCE Two weeks ago. You’d know it if you ever went to school.

OPRAH I suppose I would.

[A pause.]

LUCE [Heavy breath.] I’ma shave. Make me coffee?

OPRAH No way José. No way hell.

LUCE Please? I got an interview. I’m asking you.

OPRAH We don’t have coffee.

LUCE I bought coffee yesterday.

OPRAH I don’t know how to grind it.

LUCE Pre-ground.

OPRAH Fine...

[LUCE stands up, lumbers over OPRAH, kisses her forehead.]

LUCE Put on some clothes ‘for Axl gets here.

OPRAH What’s wrong with these?

LUCE Put on some sweatpants.

OPRAH Okay.

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 13

[LUCE walks upstairs.]

OPRAH Naw, I’m feeling lazy.

[OPRAH stands up, singing “Sweet Child of Mine” softly under her breath as she tries to make coffee. She doesn’t know how to make coffee. The sky slowly clears up.]

“She’s got a smile that it seems to meReminds me of childhood memories Where everything Was as fresh as the bright blue sky Now and then when I see her face She takes me away to that special placeAnd if I’d stare too long I’d probably break down and cry”

[Sound of a car pulling up.]

O, Sweet child o’ mine

[AXL enters, standing in the doorway, wearing a t-shirt that says “Shit happens” in fat white letters. Jeans. He has none of her father’s paunch.]

AXL Oprah?

OPRAH Who’sit?

[AXL walks into the kitchen area.]

OPRAH Oh, hi Axl.

AXL Hey Oprah, I could use a cup if you don’t mind.

OPRAH I’m not a barista.

AXL If you don’t mind.

ALPER


OPRAH Yeah.

[AXL sits down in LUCE’s chair. He combs his hair.]

[OPRAH sings “O, sweet child of mine”, lightly.]

AXL I didn’t know you knew the classics.

OPRAH I know some of the classics. The classics I like I know.

AXL That’s a classic.

OPRAH I like listening to covers of the classics.

AXL Well then you don’t like the classics. The classics, you take ‘em as is. Their way or the highway, the classics.

OPRAH Then I guess I take the highway.

AXL I guess you do.

OPRAH Bye-bye classics. Hope life treats you well.

AXL Bye Oprah, says the classics.

OPRAH The classics, who needs ‘em? They’re a luxury at best.

[OPRAH hands him a mug of coffee. He sips it, stands up, walks to the back of the living room and spits it out the hole.]

AXL Are you retarded?

OPRAH No.

AXL Damn.

OPRAH Quit.

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 15

AXL Tasted like sour wood.

OPRAH Quit! I ain’t never making you coffee again!

AXL Fine by me. Makes me the happiest.

OPRAH Me too.

AXL How old are you now?

OPRAH Seventeen.

AXL Seventeen and you can’t make a cup of coffee. And not listening to the classics. And not in school. You’re wasting your damn life, girl.

OPRAH I’m in school.

AXL Watcha doin’ here?

OPRAH Well I’m not at school. But you don’t got to be at school to be in school.

AXL Oh yeah?

OPRAH Ever heard of the internet, stupid?

AXL I heard of the internet. You know I’ve been reading your blog.

OPRAH My blog? Oh it’s just for my poetry.

AXL If there’s any poetry on there I done skipped it. You need to learn what’s appropriate sugar...

[LUCE comes downstairs. He’s wearing a very old, wrinkled suit and has nicks all over his face from the razor that he has dabbed with patches of toilet paper.]

LUCE How’s about it?

ALPER


AXL You look good. You look like the King of Queens wearing the cat’s pajamas! You look like the first trombone.

LUCE Yeah, yeah. Thanks for bringing the car over. Very neighborly.

AXL Treat her nice.

LUCE You betcha. Oprah, I look good?

OPRAH You look great daddy.

LUCE Thanks honey. Axl, would you uh… psych me up, like last time?

AXL Psych you up?

LUCE The hitting and the talking.

AXL Oh. All right.

[AXL slaps LUCE in the face.]

AXL Rock and roll is?LUCE The color of cash!


AXL The color of cash is? LUCE Red blood red!


AXL You a man?

LUCE Yeah!

AXL You still a man?

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 17

LUCE Like a fucking eagle! AXL You still a man?

LUCE Like a ten pound steak! AXL You still a real fucking man?

LUCE Yeah. Yeah. Hoo. Yeah. Bamalama! Hoo. AXL All right. Go and get ‘em.

[LUCE shakes himself, walks out.]

OPRAH The fuck was that?

AXL You ain’t never seen men communicate?

OPRAH Why’d you hit my dad?

AXL Everything’s got it’s own secret language. You don’t know that you’re just stupid.

OPRAH You gonna go home?

AXL Can’t. Your dad’s got my car. Stupid.

OPRAH You live next door.

AXL I just got here. Give a man a break.

[AXL sits in LUCE’s favorite chair, looking out at the sky.]

[The sky keeps getting brighter and brighter.]

OPRAH Well make yourself at home. Ya retard.

ALPER


AXL I guess I will.

OPRAH You think my father’s going to get that CostCo job?

AXL No way hell.

OPRAH Why not? aren’t you supposed to be his buddy?

AXL Your dad doesn’t remember things well. He doesn’t...

[Long pause.]

AXL [with satisfaction] Retain.

[Pause.]

AXL Best intentions in the world with all the air let out of em. He can get work when work’s plenty, but now money’s gone to shit so people are more discerning. Times are too tight to waste salary on men who do Sudoku in the stockroom. You need to be a hustler, like rappers been saying all these years. I tell you, go to the classics for your soul, but put on some rap if you want a lesson. I’m a hustler. I try to clue your daddy in but he don’t hear the music.

OPRAH Why you badmouthing him? Aren’t you supposed to be his friend?

AXL I guess. We’re neighbors. So we’re friends because that’s neighborly. But I don’t see why I got to lie to you. Seeing as you’ve been so honest with me.

OPRAH Honest, shit, I tol’ you my age. That’s public domain.

AXL Shhh. Listen honey. Remember when I told you everything has it’s own secret language?

OPRAH Yeah.

AXL The internet fer example, has got a language all it’s own, so thin and scrawled out you’d think it was chicken-scratch Chinese. But I speak it. I’m

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 19

fluent. I can run a search so hard I make Google look like a beat dog peeing on its own leg. Found yer blog.

OPRAH So? I just got poems.

AXL I didn’t read no poems. I just read a bunch of seventeen year old girl journal entries chopped up into lines. That ain’t art. That ain’t no excuse for school.

OPRAH Shit, what you know about poetry, Axl? You think Guns ‘N Roses is good fer your soul. You don’t know art from Applebees.

AXL I guess I don’t. I should give yer poems another look.

OPRAH You should. They’re real good. I don’t think I’m Emily Dickinson but I work hard on ‘em.

[AXL feels around in his pockets, pulls out a folded piece of printer paper.]

AXL [reading]

“I want a man. A man like a bear toWarm me when the sun dropssnuffed out and heavy like a steelball out of the sky.”

I really like that part. It’s pretty.

“I want a man to fill me with bloodall my blood is goneflushed into arab sands.”

I guess that parts topical, or something.

Who in pathetic timesmakes the women women?I have started reading Oprah’s booksI was named after Oprah and I started reading her books.

ALPER


And I love themso muchthat I want someoneto fuckmewhile I read themI want to read a whole book whileSomeone fucks me from behind.I want our panting to turn the pages.”

[AXL puts the page back in his pocket. He walks towards OPRAH.]

OPRAH It’s art, Axl. You can put anything you want in art. Sexy stuff doesn’t count as bad if it’s art. My daddy took me to a museum when I was little and every single painting in it had a nude lady in it and he told me, he told me that that was okay because it was art.

AXL You can’t put sexy art on the internet. The art part just gets forgotten. Anyway, I didn’t see your poem in no museum. And your daddy don’t know his thing from his finger.

OPRAH Don’t talk about my daddy like that. You’re supposed to be his friend.

AXL I am his friend. They’re ain’t no friends no more really, but I’m his friend because I understand him. I don’t mean to act like I don’t like yer daddy, or even like I don’t respect him. He’s got soul, I respect that. Yer daddy’s a soulful man. He just don’t got no hustle.

OPRAH I guess. I don’t think he needs no hustle.

AXL I don’t think he should need it. I know he does though. “O, sweet child o’ mine”

[AXL touches her shoulder.]

You know what they called that song when I was in school?

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 21 OPRAH What?

AXL They said it was a real panty-dropper.

OPRAH Quit!

AXL Shush.

OPRAH Quit!

AXL Damnit Oprah, I’m just being friendly.

OPRAH You said there ain’t no friends.

AXL I was joking ‘bout that.

OPRAH No you weren’t.

AXL I was too.

[Pause.]

AXL I like your poems.

OPRAH You said you didn’t.

AXL I was joking ‘bout that too. I was joking ‘bout everything. Your daddy’s gonna get that job, and you’re going to go to some fancy school. I can see it plain as day.

OPRAH Really?

AXL Yeah. I really do love your poems. I was just saying...they’re sexy. I like sexy. And they’re soulful. That’s my favorite combination right there.

OPRAH Yer just saying that.

ALPER


AXL No. I’m serious. And they really show... who you are. I can tell yer whole personality just by reading your blog.

OPRAH Oh... Well thank you Axl.

AXL There’s a secret language to poems. I never learned it.

OPRAH Well... You can’t know everything...

AXL We should talk, cause I think we have things to teach each other . You and I could learn a little something. As long as you ain’t at school. How ‘bout it, Oprah?

[Pause.]

OPRAH Okay.

[AXL swings her up into his arms.]

OPRAH Axl! Shit!

AXL Shh... It’s bright outside. Lookit.

OPRAH It hurts my eyes.

AXL Shut ‘em.

[OPRAH shuts her eyes tight. AXL carries her out through the hole in the back.]

[A long pause.]

[LUCE enters, shaking.]

LUCE Hey, Oprah baby! Axl! Where’s everybody?

ALPER

SPRING 2010 | 23

[LUCE sits in his favorite chair, loosens his tie.]

LUCE Shit.

[He looks out the hole.]

LUCE Damn, when’d it get so bright?

[Light floods the stage.]

THE END.


The rain green front door flew bythe forest thought it was quitting timea watermark twitched, a roebuckslipped on the parquet Old Apple Face dustedthe armchair hidden in his hairHackberry sycoraxed a dishof plums, nutshells fell on the snoring mastiff and his nursing bottle spoiled milk surrounded the imp pubescent blue teeth and gutta perchawere heaped in the kitchen how comforting this is to the dwarf’s sleep

GIZZI

OUR FAMILIARS

For HollisMichael Gizzi

SPRING 2010 | 25

He took another breath with manifest regret, threw a blade of grass to a drowning ant. What was he supposed to do, submit to a shivering world? He smiled his bag of frozen corn.Now he was right sized, his pajamas grinned.He emerged from hibernation. Spreading his sails small waves chopped twinkles the size of sparrows. Fish climbed to the top of the sun, he used them to count the hours. He dragged a boat through the trees. A pattern was forming.He was asking for help—in order to amuse himself? Is this my house? No. This was a sticky ripple.In the algebraic rain he cleared his throat, looked at the remains. The pile had finally fallen into place.

GIZZI

THE SHIN-KICKING YEARS

For Joe StarninoMichael Gizzi


There are twelve thatched umbrellas with four chairs each. In the two o’clock sun, a shadow from each umbrella, askew on the sand, reaches towards the next. Still, arranged like they are, in an arc around the bowed shore, every one falls short. There is little wind and the water laps demurely. Large families are discouraged. Over under the third umbrella, there is an elderly British couple. They have been coming to this place, on this week, for over fifteen years. They are not the only ones. Revealed by a certain panache at maneu-vering the lunch spread, or by hearty hellos to half-remembered wait-staff, other regulars return yearly to stake a claim in a week of halcyon horizontality. Sometimes they acknowledge each other vigorously; other times, not at all. To the Geigers, under the umbrella closest to the cliff, everyone is a stranger.

GGG Laurel Geiger is uncomfortable; she can’t help herself. She is situ-ated wholly under the umbrella, on the diagonal, in the hopes that she is shielded from both direct and reflected rays of sun. Nonetheless, the nub from the towel, or the starch, or the sand in its folds, is inflaming her hamstrings and back.

She has taken great pains to avoid this discomfort. In the morn-ings, she follows a strict regimen. It occurs behind the louvered bath-room doors; it involves three types of unguents. And still, despite ac-robatic efforts and feats of flexibility, Laurel has fingerprints and severe lines scorched into mysterious places on her body. She will not ask Dean to help her; it might require reciprocity. The thought of suntan lotion

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS

REGENBOGEN

Alexandra Regenbogen

SPRING 2010 | 27

and the fine hairs on his shoulders is more than she can bear. Today is the third day of their vacation.

Laurel watches Dean in the water. Rather, Laurel watches the water, and can’t help but see Dean. He is on a white raft, one of many that is dragged out by staff each morning, freshly hosed, improbably sandless. He is too tall for the float; his perch is precarious. His knees make sharp angles against the horizon. Every once in a while, a wave will nudge him or his shoulders will slip, and his body will make jerky exaggerated motions to right his balance and salvage his book from the ocean. Laurel wonders if the other people on the beach can see him. She stares intently at the light reflecting on the water, blurring her vision. She notices that with enough strength, enough focus, eyes crossed just so, the small figure on the white raft shimmers, realigns, and then disappears in the blinding sun.

GGG Dean, in the water, is not reading his book. He is staring at a wom-an’s tits. She is walking along the shore with a man: her husband, presum-ably. She is not close enough for Dean to be sure how old she is. That is unimportant. What is important is the fact that when she walks, the string that holds her bikini top in place gives, just a little. As they walk, her hus-band keeps his arm around her hip. Dean knows that the husband’s thumb is hooked into the space between the tight lycra and her skin. Dean hopes she is sweating.

Laurel has not worn a bathing suit like that in years. That’s fine, Dean realizes, when the image of his pink striated wife interrupts his mind’s eye. He sees the beach-walking woman stop and bend down over something at the waterline. Dean readjusts the nose piece of his sunglasses and squints with renewed concentration through the window between his novel and his splayed legs.

Parts of her dip into the water. Soon, pieces of her hair will drip onto her shoulders and tiny beads of water will slink over those just-slack

REGENBOGEN


bikini straps. The two will keep walking, probably to the terrace to eat lobster, and her husband’s fingers will grab a tighter hold when they walk because she is slippery, and soon she will have to cover herself under some type of floral robe, and her tits will be still wet underneath, and no one will know that except for the husband who will get to taste her sweat later, when they are in bed, and her floral robe is on the floor, who will get to trace the under edge of her tits where her bathing suit is now, and when Dean’s raft bumps into the cliff by his umbrella he is submerged, novel and all, into the chill shallows.

GGG Look at how he is standing, Laurel smirks to herself. She twists her wide brimmed hat and removes her sunglasses to get a better look. Laurel has stopped watching Dean; she is watching the husband standing over his crouching wife by the water. The woman is bent over in the shal-low water, fingers combing through the sand. She is clearly looking for something she has dropped. Her husband is standing behind her, hands on hips, offering no help, none at all. Laurel is starving, despite her breakfast of egg-white omelets and papaya wheat pancakes. She is ravenous. The omelets and pancakes are covered by their meal plan; lunch is not. She is peeved by her own craving for tuna nicoise. If she asks Dean, he’ll say yes. She does not want to gratify him that way. The woman by the shore stands up; whether she has found what she was looking for Laurel does not know. What Laurel does know is that the woman is speaking to her husband and that he is not listening. Perhaps they are arguing. The man is quite attractive, Laurel notices. The woman has the beginnings of cellulite. Laurel decides that the woman is not young enough for a bathing suit that small. Laurel bets their sex is terrible. She smugly notices how carelessly the husband’s arm is draped around the woman’s hips, his thumb holding her bathing suit like an after-thought, the way one might hold a keychain under an armload of grocer-ies.

REGENBOGEN

SPRING 2010 | 29

Dean lumbers out of the ocean, and Laurel puts her sunglasses back on.

GGG Dean, as he is climbing out of the water, gets to see the woman’s body even closer. She has a constellation of beauty marks under her ribs. He wonders how her frame, her taut, tan, and tiny frame, might hold up under his weight in bed. Dean looks at the husband once and gives a friendly nod. The husband is wearing a watch that proves this vacation is not beyond his means. Dean would have liked to stop and talk. He would have liked to know the color of the woman’s eyes, which he imagined were unusual, like purple. He would have liked to speak casually of business, sounding wise and wealthy. He would have liked to invite them to lunch, to order a round of planter’s punch on his tab and to learn about how they had met. He could spend an hour, close to her coyness, close to his quiet adoration, across the table from her tits under her robe. He did not stop and talk; he did not want to interrupt their con-versation. They were clearly engrossed, and serene. At their umbrella, Laurel is looking so wretched that he thinks, for a minute, fleetingly, she might have to let him lift her up.

GGG At the umbrella, Dean gives Laurel that look that says, “You look miserable.” “I’m not miserable,” she says outloud. Dean gives her the look again as he hurls water out of his ears. Laurel sighs, in a loud way, and rolls her eyes, which are behind her sunglasses. She is alert because the couple will surely pass their umbrella on the way to the terrace. She will get to hear a part of their argument.

GGG

REGENBOGEN


Once, when Dean and Laurel were in Tuscany, on their honey-moon, she was hanging laundry on a clothesline surrounded by tea-olives and bees. Dean, who was helping her, asked her what was wrong. Laurel felt her shirt sticking to her back, her bra carving rawly into her sides. She felt like she was breathing through someone else’s armpit. She told Dean she was hot. Dean took a clothespin out from his mouth and looked at her eyes, which, even in the Italian sun, were nothing unusual. “Well,” he said, thumbing his wedding band. “What will you do when our babies are hot?” and then watched to see how her tears would refract the light.

GGG The couple on the beach does not pass the Geiger’s umbrella on the way to the terrace. They loop around the elderly British couple to access the outdoor shower. The woman is holding her feet under the spigot, and her husband is dusting sand off her back. Laurel and Dean are sitting with their backs to each other. Laurel looks at the couple and senses Dean in her periphery doing the same. As Laurel looks across the beach at the two cleaning each other, she wonders if they can afford the meal plan with lunch included. She wonders if their argument is regarding the price of iced coffees and tuna nicoise. As Dean looks across the beach at the two of them cleaning each other, he remembers being eleven at his first tennis lesson. He remem-bers standing across from his tennis coach who had slim, tanned hands and a very white pair of shorts. He remembers missing the volleys that she aimed at him, one after the other, in the blinding sun. He remem-bers how his racket kept slipping, how he was the reason the balls were drumming over and over into the sad slack of the humid net.

REGENBOGEN

SPRING 2010 | 31

Once heaven was just a boy and a girl And a path to the beach. That was before the rooms were gutted and you learned How to exhibit bereavement Would earn your weight in brimming Moon lagers. Literally, “the bee’s knees.” The shoulders of Roland de Smoke Cuddle two abreast on a tray. While air lasts, cities also die, old gasbags With quilted manners, prepuce because the English Taste in pictures slackened. Then again, despite the poison crumbs, The two just walk on tiptoes out of doors, Pressing along the keen incline. What will happen, what to say If and when the first door opens, the wingsFlutter in turn as nights subside?

THE ONE GOD

BERKSON

Bill Berkson


CENSUSRachel Arndt

ARNDT

As we admit years, mounting sums now integral to themselves, we grow accustomed to framed waiting, the love of holding (reconciliation). The ceremony of summit begins to sink with bare acceptance of movement, and so we notice ruins to mark the location of mechanical extinction. A companionship born of flash and outlasting: They dreamt with false warning of glass and how it acts to flatten the shallow view, the solid comfort of constant pace. The savage stems that do not erupt into buds are a refusal of ending. It is easier, this forced unbeing, to attract entropy, to look forward to decay because it has already begun and is sure.

SPRING 2010 | 33

STILL-LIFE FOR ESTELLEColette Garrigues

GARRIGUES

To dust and cracked urns.

… Reading the letter she slipped behind the photograph of a lover, some distinguished-looking man, and all I wanted was the frame. Watched rain run Brooklyn down on the outside of a windowpane, watched water boil. Have seen all the nooks and crannies of a lifetime alone, been where we used to reach our child-fists into drawers, where she dug around for hand-me-downs. Driven over swollen rivers to get here, where she hoarded costume jewelry, where she kept all the old playbills, receipts, where we can’t keep this up for much longer.

§

The apartment in Fort Green was filled with her lifetime’s worth of this and that, the legacy of a packrat. An inability to let go of and all-around tightfistedness. Sentimental, sure. Drawers upon drawers of filled with containers for. Fifteen sets of satin gloves still tethered to their sales tags. To remember how it was subsisting on caffeine and nicotine, the occasional chocolate bar. Because she was poor or. Because she could not afford to gain weight. Could have lost her livelihood, already too tall for a dancer, some said. (This before she lugged after her an oxygen tank on wheels.)

As happens with inheritance, most everything was lost in the shuffle. Photographs taken of Estelle working with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Taken of John Cage’s accompaniment—a still life. The blood and guts of bookshelves, all the pillaged volumes. But by the time I appeared on the scene boxes and boxes of, whole rooms even had already been done away with. Except for the scaffolding: her diaries, Love Poems, a few pieces of furniture.

(from Writing in the Family)


GARRIGUES

§

“Dance is another way of putting things; if it could be put into words, it would be.”

Martha Graham thought this to the point that she burned all her notes, that they not be seen. Later she would come around, agree to be photographed, to a memoir even, to reconstruct what was lost.

Leafing through the apartment, I found that Estelle kept a log for everything. The year 1976, for instance: what she’d eaten that day, lunch with so-and-so, appointment at such-and-such, pills for, to purchase, groceries, dollars spent, on tickets, on travel, book’s she’d read, or wanted to read, lesson plans, steps to a combination, composition, costume, down to the type of stitch.

I should note here that Martha Graham was an idol for Estelle. Or, at least, she always said that.

§

By the time she found dance Estelle was five foot ten on her shorter days, six feet when she learned to stand tall. Still, Martha Graham herself started late and there was something about Estelle: Oh My What Legs You Have, but more: those rough edges and her father’s fight (in the ring they called him Harry the Horse). That she worked days and put herself through school at night. She reached beyond herself, even at that height, and when a lot of women could not muster enough fire to warm their toes. Sharp wit, loud mouth, not your everyday sort of everywoman. From the get-go she would not could not settle for the predetermined (cat-clawed her father’s mother so she could switch tracks in high school, from vocational to academic). She held on too tight for too long to win over most of the time. What kept her going fourteen years after the doctors said she’d be gone.

§

About life Graham said, “There are daily small deaths.”

SPRING 2010 | 35

GARRIGUES

The contraction was a reaction to posture: to lean muscles laid upon little bones brittle, to weightlessness. Ballet had too little to do with nervous disorders, just short of breath, another layer of skin. But Graham learned early, the body gives us away: “You see, no matter what you say, you reveal yourself ” her father said about the lie. (Down to your child fists and lip tremble.) He dealt with inner senses, had a tendency to diagnose. Later Graham too would watch out for disfigure, and set about to put pain in motion.

§

At the age of seventy-something Estelle took the subway, never a cab, when she took me to see the ballet. Back stooped, bone on bone, earlobes drooped with the weight of fake pearls. Even after she’d undergone surgery for two knees and a hip. Arthritis of the joints and both breasts removed. It wasn’t an issue of money exactly—we always sat in the Orchestra section, sometimes dead center Mezzanine, first tier. At the time I couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of that gesture, overcome more by the expanse itself: golden dome for sky and the sturdy unfurling of four tiers towards the stage. But how could I have understood, sitting dead center, that Estelle sitting next to me had purchased the most coveted two by four feet of space. In the middle of all that. Was later told how she used to pay out of pocket for forty of her students, inner city, to stand at the back of the fourth tier at Lincoln Center. How towards the end her nose always bled so she’d carry tissues crumpled in her Channel 13 canvas bag. Still she shouldered an oxygen tank—picture this: over her shoulder—when she came to see me dance the part.

§

This memory was reconstructed from a photograph: Black patent leather shoes size 6-years-old. Fingers sticky inside white faux fur hand muff. We had to fold and stack three wool jackets for me to sit on so I could see over all the hat-flattened hairdos. I don’t remember seeing past that, or if I do it’s because we went again the year after, or by age 11 I had filled in every role down to the Nutcracker himself since no boys ever did show at Mrs. Baron’s School of Ballet.


GARRIGUES

Or, years later, once I had turned in my pointe shoes and begun to put on woman parts, the American Ballet Theater’s Romeo and Juliet brought me to tears: weightless, and the fact that there were no words.

Alvin Ailey’s Revelations was exactly that for me. Like stumbling upon some undiscovered tongue or watching an underwater birth. It was the first time I had ever seen someone breathe on stage. To begin with, nine of them inhale all at once—a ripple effect.

§

About ballet Graham said, “It did not say enough.”

How to let your body parts speak for themselves:

To begin with, the floor: on your back, or, feet flat down to earth. To begin with, the effects of air: trigger gut to grip and pelvis thrust, jut out arms and legs head jerk to surge or fall. Plunge and spasm. But in addition to percussion: the plush of flesh, the sweep of cloth, the breath about a pillowcase.

§

Because, if I could say in so many words

I would have.

We dance because

We can’t keep long enough on two feet for a chance on the beat for a

change in

consistent swing with the way things are or already

Sometimes the silence after is too much to take

So be light, walk soft, stay on the

(in, out)

To keep time.

Walk soft, for a change. Swing low.

Count how many steps it takes to

SPRING 2010 | 37

HOMAGE TO MATISSEJanet Zong

ZONG

You are a cartographer with closed eyes, hands perched like birds.

Be heedful when age beckons crookedly. The more years draped across your shoulders, the more you are stifled by maps of skins.

How cryptic is the body? Gestures can be repeated, but they are never the same. The atmosphere comesunpinned.

Nameless silhouettes with brittle tongues and sheer reflections shift their boundaries to find missing walls, tender concrete, jeweled darkness.


Feathery limbs overlap in a tangle of routes that stretch. Manufacture colors from pale light— routes that turn the idea of a thing into the thing itself.

ZONG

SPRING 2010 | 39

Where I had a smallcut on my thumb myright thumb (I forgetfrom what) I lookedagain the next dayand it was gone I sawit was gone—(not quite all gone) My brother’s toysoldier we had brokenit (not on purpose) we could not put it (him) away with the trashso we put it (him) outback with the flowers thebushes the grass I looked again the next dayand it (he) was the same:broken I saw he wasbroken (not quitethe same though—still broken)

THUMBMichael Sunshine

SUNSHINE

Contributors

† Bill Berkson attended Brown from fall 1957 to 1959, during which time he published poetry and criticism in Brunonia and also contributed literary reviews to the Daily Herald. He now lives in San Francisco, where for many years he was professor of Liberal Arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. His recent books include The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings; Sudden Address: Selected Lectures; BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen; another words-and-image collaboration with George Schneeman entitled Ted Berrigan; and Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems.

† Michael Gizzi is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2010, Grants to Artists Award. His most recent book of poems is New Depths of Deadpan, Burning Deck Press, 2009.

Sam Alper is a Literary Arts major studying playwriting at Brown University. His plays and poetry have been featured previously in The College Hill Independent and Stomach Level Cravings Collective exhibitions. Most recently, his new play, The Sound, commissioned by The Collectin Collective, premiered in New York.

*Rachel Z. Arndt ’10 studies creative writing and Spanish. She enjoys bacon, series commas, and the Great Lakes.

Colette Garrigues studies English at Brown. This is the first time her writing has appeared in print. Colette grew up in New Jersey.

*Alexandra Regenbogen graduated from Brown University with a degree in Literary Arts in May 2009. She’s currently still in Providence and enrolled at the Warren Alpert Medical School where she intends to pursue Psychiatry and to continue writing.

Michael Sunshine ‘11 grew up in Los Angeles and currently studies mechanical engineering. He gets a thorough sense of enjoyment from playing the bass guitar and built his own last fall. He began writing poetry when he was told to in 4th grade.

Janet Zong ‘11 is concentrating in English literature and international relations. She calls Houston, Texas home.

† - indicates a notable contributor* - indicates a repeat contributor

the brown literary review · the brown literary review volume iii, issue ii spring 2010 editor jeff...

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