i
By the shadowless, lion-bluff of Pigeon
Island, you have gone swimming, a clear
afternoon, children’s faint play noise ring
in the yard
It was a boy named Pierre Powell
that was in charge of the atlas
in the cabinet. He also ended days
by shaking the iron bell from principal
William’s window, a work we grudged
him for very little
Photo by Jeep Wheat
I write twice a week in the Watson Room at Forbes, the public library in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a simple space, dedicated, according to a brass plaque, to the memory of Julia and Rosa Watson, who made generous bequests. There are built-in cabinets with locked glass doors, full of old books, all bound in the same black with gold letters on their spines. Statistics of Coal. Geology for Beginners. Select British Poets, Hazlitt. Don Juan, Byron. Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Scott, volumes 1, 2 and 3. There are six long, wide windows with green blinds, which look out over the library parking lot. The cars and the people seem vivid but far away.
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.
By SETH PERLOW
Dear future self, when you read this
will they have abolished the yellow
light, or merely changed its function?
Where I come from, we have a color
for Sort-of-stop, but no way to express
Sort-of-go.
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.
Event Date:
Periodically Speaking at the New York Public Library hosts The Common. Join editor Jennifer Acker in conversation with (and readings by): Brook Wilensky-Lanford; Maura Candela; and Angela Veronica Wong.
Periodically Speaking is “a reading series providing a major venue for emerging writers to present their work while emphasizing the diversity of America’s literary magazines and the magazine collections of The New York Public Library.” Find more information about Periodically Speaking here.
Head to the main branch of the Library and enter at 5th Ave (betwixt the famous lions). Once you’re in the lobby, take a left and walk all the way to the end of the hallway—we’ll be in the last room on the left (Room 108).
Admission is free.
Electric Literature covers The Common‘s one-year celebration in their blog “The Outlet”.
Book by CATHERINE CHUNG
Reviewed by
Early in Catherine Chung’s debut novel, Forgotten Country, the narrator’s mother and aunt, as girls in Korea soon after the war, come upon an unexploded bomb in the woods.
“It can’t go off now, can it?” her mother asks.
“Of course it can,” the sister answers. “It happens all the time, don’t you know anything?”
The bomb does not go off, and the sisters make up afterward, and when the elder sister goes to university, she is taken in the night by North Korean agents and never heard from again.
Forgotten Country is unrelenting with such reversals, but with such calm assurance that I had the sense of being borne along on a great river whose pace was not immediately apparent for its scale. There are few moments that cascade into edge-of-one’s-seat crisis; I soon learned to read every page at the edge of my seat, for what is liable to happen when the bombs don’t go off.
My grandfather lives in a small house in a small town in Denmark—which, as it happens, is a small country. The town is Græse Bakkeby, which boasts a population of 2,300 people, though it is part of the larger Frederikssund townscape. It’s the kind of place no one who visits the country ever really experiences, in part because there’s no reason to, and yet it’s often the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Denmark. The smell and tang and feel of his house is the same as it was in the house he and my grandmother used to live in, in Værløse, before she died in 1999. It’s a mixture of the coffee maker, my grandfather’s cologne, his many annotated books, and the general cleanliness of the place (he is a neat man and takes pride in it). To the sound of the news on the radio or a Mozart concerto I see him scurrying about his little home, well-dressed, a comb in his back pocket, forever clearing his throat. He sips his coffee while squeezing his eyes shut, as if to intensify its flavor. He pulls a volume from the shelf (Ulysses? The Brothers Karamazov? The Magic Mountain?) and revisits his younger self. He thinks of me and my siblings. He thinks of his sons, my father and uncle. He thinks of his wife.
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