On Gary Hume’s “The Whole World” (2011)
Usually I prefer the image to go off the edges of the panel, for it to be larger than the space I can capture it in. - Gary Hume The brain is a soaked cabbage, its iters ancient mazes beneath new gloss of orbits gentle in dark magenta space. Why are this world’s edges so close? Below, nothing else interrupts; we nearly fall off the old thought into color, a race of slaw slowly watching its own wrinkles age, age into forever’s...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Oct 12 (Grief)
As we near the end of October, we enter a season of remembrance, a holiday dedicated to honoring those who passed before us. This week’s contributors help to forge a path through grief. In “Reading My Father” by Anthony Botti, favorite books help conjure memories of a father. “Bearing Loss” by Frank De Canio uses the imagery of fall to explore seasons of change and loss. “Walter, Pierre, Tim, Howard” by Anthony Botti eulogizes four friends lost during the initial days of the AIDS epidemic. “You squint the way one eye still aches” by Simon Perchik...
Read MoreYou squint the way one eye still aches
You squint the way one eye still aches was shaped by rising water as it flattens out in the silence that wants you to make good without asking why or what for –it’s how moonlight works, half disguised as tears to soften the ground half as a sea that long ago left all these bottom stones uncovered as the mist where their breath used to be –somebody owes them all something though you come by to pay down one that still has its arms around you is pulling you closer to shore by wiping the foam from your lips –you darken the Earth to get a better look and with child-like...
Read MoreWalter, Pierre, Tim, Howard
We had a good rain all night, their names crashing down from the past. Thirty years later from up here in this bedroom window, I see across the wide lawn where everything in these gardens goes on at such a fast pace… the lilacs, peonies, roses. The new delight, purple phlox blooming late in the cool mountain air. For some time now I’ve not spoken their names, young men who hungered for the world they were losing, and what in their leaving, they took. They died without funerals. We gave away their clothes to Goodwill, all of them we outlived. At the time did not know how much we...
Read MoreBearing Loss
What kindling love is this that sanctifies the earth with memories proliferating like the grave turning of a second birth? What enterprising arms disseminate their charms like seeds on fallow fields to function as a lavish yield for autumn’s harvest? Suspended on such tensile roots, they bring forth fruits which thrive on sappy juices of their germinating tree – if just to nurture offshoots for posterity. But what use cultivating heartbreak’s fertile soil, that promises abundance from such husbandry? Tears scarcely save the desiccated oak, nor does grief breathe life into a...
Read MoreReading My Father
By December with your death not yet a habit, a box of books arrives that you asked my sister to pack up for me. On the top I pull out Raccontini Italiani, open to the dedication page, notes scrawled in Italian in your curly cursive, the blue ink of a felt tip pen now faded. I placed distance between us that last year, not prepared to let what was happening to you reach me, just allowing bits and pieces in, closed my eyes to things I could not look at head-on, controlling the itinerary of my visits to Pittsburgh. The catalog of emotion from your last year disappeared when you died in early...
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