Issues

Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter

Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter

April 1, 2012 , ,
By ANGELA VERONICA WONG 

 

Dear Johnny,
In your last letter, you requested
. Take my photograph down, you wrote. Disremember.
Yesterday M started talking. All at once, as if inside, she had alphabets that ached to break
out. We were                                 and relieved. We               it would never happen. Johnny, the
tomato plant takes water as if in love, and a map upside down is still a map. The arrows,
,              . I’ve
.                placed Europe above the         .      It hangs like our                   .
Every morning, I
. I trace where you could be: Newbury, Canterbury,                 ,
Maidstone, Kent.         will bring you to another place: Merville, Pas de Calais, Caen,
. You are pushing through fields. In          , one cloud like an apology. I
think the word verdant, and it brings me closer to             . I       the word tomorrow. It
a falling body.                                                     . Johnny, I am busy          history.
We were climbing a hill in                   . The ice soaked through our mittens. I
. You                        . Johnny, the ocean has salt
enough without your blood. I feel your hurried fear, tendoned and tight. You make your
body small. We split at what seems              . We
.   Johnny,                                        .
There are so many spaces my body needs filled.                   Love, your dark-haired
doll.

Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter
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Boxwood

Boxwood

April 1, 2012 , ,

By KATHERINE HILL

The voice came from a white utility van parked alongside the campus tennis courts. “Hey baby,” it said, in the sort of voice that comes from vans.

Right away, I knew it was the skirt. I tugged at it and looked all around—across the empty student parking lot where I sometimes rollerbladed; at the drab, squashed little dorm that had the best vending machine; at the ivy-choked library where I’d recently borrowed the first season of Twin Peaks, which had gotten me so excited I’d filled two whole sheets of college-ruled loose-leaf about the way the wobbly ceiling fan in my dad’s faculty office might at any second crash murderously to the floor. I looked everywhere but at the voice.

Boxwood
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The Common Statement

The Common Statement

April 1, 2012

A family friend, one of AP’s first female photojournalists, used to cover news in Florida. One day there was a kidnapping. She had a hunch that she could catch a crucial part of the action at the girl’s parents’ house, so she staked it out, waiting in the car, until the parents emerged. She captured them on film, then chased the car in which the FBI whisked them away. When her hatchback couldn’t keep up with government issue, 
she quit while ahead and drove to a motel, where she developed her prints in the bathtub.

The Common Statement
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Above Grade: New York City’s High Line

Above Grade: New York City’s High Line

November 10, 2011 , ,

By PHILLIP LOPATE
When, in June 2009, the High Line Park opened to the public, it was declared an almost unqualified success. Some architecture critics nit-picked the design, but basically they endorsed it, and ordinary folk (I include myself in that category), less fastidious, greeted it with enthusiasm. Crowds lined up for hours to have the elevated promenade experience, it became a (free) hot-ticket item in New York City, which typically over-embraces a novelty for six months, then ignores it. Especially in hot weather, the challenge soon became to grab one of the reclining benches on the sundeck and tan yourself for hours, while envious masses stumbled by. The crowded, restless carnival-grounds movement of the park-goers above-ground rhymed the pedestrian conveyer-belt effect of the gridded streets below: Manhattan is a place where loitering in one place is done at your peril. Paris has boulevard cafes for cooling one’s heels, Rome comes to a rest at fountains and piazzas, but in Manhattan you keep moving forward. Well and good: I approve.

Above Grade: New York City’s High Line
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Gypsy

Gypsy

November 1, 2011 , ,

By J. MALCOLM GARCIA
1.

I imagine it this way. Gypsy awakens from a restless sleep, stretches. Hears his muscles and bones crack, sees how his curtains absorb the light 
of a late San Francisco afternoon, and at that moment decides to start drinking again.

He doesn’t remember having a booze dream, just woke up and decided: Today is the day I’m going to get fucked up. Something clicks into place. Thank God, it’s been decided.
For days he had found it hard to sit still, hard to sleep. His body ached from the weight of his bitterness. He tried to read some of his old text books on alcoholism and its treatment, tried to take pleasure in his term papers and the comments scrawled in red, Nice insight! and Excellent observation! but those evening extension classes at Berkeley had been nothing but a betrayal, an illusion of accomplishment, and he tossed the books and his notepads across the room with a rage that kept him awake at night. He had done everything he should, and still he was denied what he deserved.

Gypsy
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Realism in Nature’s Garden

Realism in Nature’s Garden

November 1, 2011 , ,

By SARAH LURIA and DANIEL JACKSON

Houghton Garden (Fig. 1) was created in 1906, on the grounds of an estate in Newton, Massachusetts, owned by Martha Gilbert Houghton and her husband. Houghton hired Warren Manning, a leading landscape architect and former member of Frederick Law Olmsted’s studio, to work with her on a design for her garden. Manning disliked the kind of formal garden fashionable at the time, which subdued nature with symmetrical, geometric forms. He advocated what he called a “nature garden,” whose design was less invasive, and took advantage of the elements nature already provided. This demanded, as he put it in an essay quoted by Robin Karson in Nature and Ideology (1997):

Realism in Nature’s Garden
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The Common Statement

The Common Statement

November 1, 2011 , ,

By JENNIFER ACKER

This summer, for the first time in my life of weather, I walked through a rainstorm: entered, endured, exited. All within one hundred yards of a smooth country road.

Other firsts: bearing out tornado warnings in the basement of Frost Library (twice); a moment of queasy lilting I assumed was in my head but turned out to be a Virginia-originated earthquake; battening hatches (drawing water, securing heavy items in the backyard) against a hurricane. To be truthful, I have experienced earthquakes and hurricanes before, but the former was in Guatemala, where such things are expected; the latter was in the foreign country of childhood in which parents are responsible for taping the windows, and I was allowed to dance in the driveway in my bathing suit in the warm wet eye of the storm.

The Common Statement
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