Tag: NOR 28
Night Train
By Emily Tuszynska
Featured Art: Train by Edward Mitchell Bannister
The interior landscape shifts, erodes.
While the children sleep we shore it up
with flotsam but the next day another
tide-bitten chunk of coastline
crumbles. The trouble is we’re living
all at once. We keep rearranging the furniture
to try to make it fit. By day we push
aside the clutter, lay the baby
on the floor she drums with open palms
as if to feel it’s there. Something solid
underneath. Mostly everything sways.
A tree falls and the house next door
stands empty for years. The boy holds his sister
to the window and shows her how
to wave goodbye, and that’s the morning,
fingerprints in the dust of it. Outside the day
moves away in all directions. Streetlights
come on. When as I walk the baby the night train
whistles through its distant crossing,
why does it feel like we are the ones
hurtling toward some unknown destination?
I lean my forehead against the icy, rattling glass,
look through our reflection at the moon
rushing through branches. Look, there’s a farmhouse,
miles from the lights of any town. Someone
turns on a lamp in one of the windows;
someone stands there, watching us go past.
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Awe
By Peter Krumbach
Featured Art: Blossoming Cherry Trees by Kano Sanraku (1559-1635)
I waited for it in the fork
of a cherry tree. On the LL
train. Made bed for it in my 8th
Street room. I left gaps in sentences
where it could land. Dug holes, smoked
ham, lost bets and innocence, granted
exculpation long before it sinned.
To track its scent, I stripped
and whorled, committed perfidy,
burned effigies and caramelized
figs. I rubbed nougat with licorice
and seven sprigs of dill. I renamed
myself after it, just to see
how I rang. Morning, midnight,
noon and dusk, I texted,
sexted, called and faxed it.
For years and years, I slept unkept,
sculpting pleas and letters
of regret. And then one day
it was in my palm. Smooth
as a peanut, smelling of pine.
Dzweep, said a jay from the elm
above my head, then bolt-like
he dove and snatched it away.
Beautiful hard-eyed thief, leaving
nothing but an ampersand.
My core cracked like a deer-
struck windshield. It splintered
into little hearts shuffled through
a deck. So I wrote this
in red.
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Amtrak Psalm
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: An Uhlan (mounted soldier with a pike) by Jean Baptiste Edouard Detaille (1848-1912)
The sway-backed horses of Lompoc don’t spook anymore.
They keep their muzzles pressed, sharing a pulse
while you clatter past, invisible in tinted business class.
And whose business are you minding anyway
as you peek into the pitbull’s backyard wreckage,
glimpse the bad cuts and dye-jobs of students smoking
behind Oxnard’s International College of Beauty? Camarillo,
Moorpark, Simi Valley, recede into heat-shimmer oblivion.
At home, your daughter’s behind a closed door
with Carnivorous Red nails posting stories that dissolve.
The entire universe big-bangs away from her irreducible center
of disdain. I’ll be gone soon enough, you want to say.
So this afternoon you’ve fallen in love with the common
mourning dove, tilting at the wind on his coil of razor wire.
You’re rooting for the tag crew artists
in their neverending arms race with Parks & Rec.
Boomer and Lil’ G, Fatlip and The Dog, Fraho, Buzz,
Rollin’ Sixty and Bashr. Naming themselves
over and over in the middle of the night, learning
like Buddhist masters the lessons of impermanence.
And now you’re waving at ranks of garden gnomes—
little domestic terra cotta soldiers waiting to be found
in the Burbank Home Depot back lot. I see you, you whisper
through the glass at their earnest bearded faces.
I see every one of you.
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“Take the Neck Step Against Aging”
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666)
Today my wife bought a twin pack of neck-tightening cream
for me, and I’m trying not to take offense.
It’s not that I haven’t noticed the thinning crepe paper
over my Adam’s apple, or the way it bunches when I tie a tie,
but I guess I had hoped she would be my accomplice
in pretending. The book I’m reading’s called The Denial of Death.
It says civilization’s an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism
against the knowledge of our mortality. And yet I can’t help but hope
this cream will work. My wife learned from her mother
who learned from her mother, and so on, how the crushed
bark powder of a Thanaka tree, abraded in water and a stone dish,
will form a milky paste that protects the faces of the ones you love.
Do you know how it feels to have a woman massage her history
deep into your skin? So we pretend this is a Costco twin-pack of Thanaka
and that we have all the time in the world as she opens the jar,
warms the cream between her palms and wraps her slender fingers
around my throat. It’s one thing to try to bridge the basic duality between
the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meaning
with neck cream. It’s another to trust a woman’s hands around your throat.
“Point your chin up,” she says, cradling my head in her lap.
I’m hoping we’re part of something eternal, but if not,
that the decline of our bodies will be gradual and in tandem, and
that we will continue to be startled every March when
the flock of cedar waxwings reappears in the clattering branches
of the apple tree outside our window. See how their little masks hide
fatigue as they settle in by the dozens, Lone Ranger faces all pointed
in the same direction. Just one night in our tree on their long trip
from the sun-lashed Yucatan to the tundra of the Northwest Territories
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Requiem with “Little Wing”
By Craig van Rooyen
Featured Art: by Kenyon Cox (1856-1919)
Perhaps, on your downtown lunch stroll
in unseasonably cheery weather,
you walk up on a flock of grackles
on the ground in front of Urban Outfitters,
their impact marks still drying on the window
recently washed to display Big Sur Ribbed Pullovers
and the Willow Fuzzy Drawstring Teddy,
as if anyone believes October’s still a sweater month.
Perhaps you become suddenly dizzy,
a strange gravity drawing you toward this constellation
of twitching black holes
opened in the sidewalk at your feet.
And perhaps this brings to mind
how it feels when your face falls from your face.
In the old days before the imminent apocalypse,
the pattern would be read as omen:
a toothache’s coming on, the breath of your bride-to-be
will sour every time she walks in moonlight,
your best cow will soon grow milk-sick.
The prescriptions would be just as clear:
wash your warp and dye it while a new moon waxes;
steal a neighbor’s crickets and install them in your hearth;
milk with one hand only.
Perhaps, even now, you try to read in the little bodies
some feathered correspondence: this relates to that.
If you step on a crack, the snowy plover will slip
into extinction; if you breathe out while passing a cemetery,
Greenland’s ice shelf will break off and float away.
But the letters blur and you can’t discern the news
from the wrecked wings and necks.
On Ongoingness: A Conversation with Ada Limon and Jaswinder Bolina
Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk
David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?”
And so I want to ask both of you—How are you? First, but also, how are you as artists listening for what’s still singing? How can we—can we resist what feels like the desperation of our country?
Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]
Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.
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