By ANGELA VERONICA WONG, AMY LAWLESS
Let’s just see if it fits, and your voice blurred, your hand brushing away mine, me laughing because seriously who says that? I flashed out of my body picturing you saying this to other girls, and laughed again.
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.
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”.
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