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Narrow Road to the Interior

Matsuo Bashō — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:55:22 -0800

(Nonfiction and poetry; 1702; repr., Shambhala, 1991)

One of the greatest poets of medieval Japan, Matsuo Bashō was a man who continually wandered. He wandered from his native castle town of Ueno to the gridded center of Kyoto, and then he wandered to Edo. He wandered through different occupations: he was a servant to a feudal lord’s relative, then a worker for the waterworks department, and, finally, a poet. And in 1684, after his mother died and his little grass hut burned down, he wandered the coastlines and inland roads of Japan, eventually walking for thousands of miles, making studies of nature, people, and human spirituality. In the spring and summer of 1689, Bashō set out on one of his final journeys, and he chronicled his travels and meditations in a mixed-genre work of prose and haiku.

Shelf Space

Aleksandra Crapanzano — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:37:33 -0800

The five white binders sit on a shelf a few feet from my desk. They are a testament to organization—not mine, I assure you, but that of a wondrous intern I hired a few years ago to catalog and file one thousand recipes. She did this with the precision and detail normally reserved for, say, compiling a Shakespeare concordance or a folio of Leonardo da Vinci drawings. Her work was impeccable. Recipes are cross-referenced by ingredient, cook, country of origin, and course. Crepes might be found in Breakfast, subcategory Pancake, but surely also in Dessert, subcategory French, and in France, subcategory Traditional. There would be a dozen or so variations to choose from, including, I remember, a Viennese one for Palatschinken from David Bouley’s lavish book East of Paris: see Vienna and New York Restaurant Chefs. This system, you must understand, was my dream. Or so I believed. Since Lauren presented me with these perfect binders three years ago, I have not once opened them.

My Dinner Chez Monsieur Paul

Sylvie Bigar — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:35:58 -0800

I hadn’t visited Lyon for more than twenty years, having moved from Europe to New York and started a family, but on this trip I was returning to report for Food Arts on the young hot chefs who’d recently made the city sizzle. I grew up in Geneva, but my grandmother Madeleine was born in Lyon, and throughout my childhood, my father kept an office there. Every Thursday, after visiting what he, and generations before him, called the “capital of gastronomy,” he’d bring back the same fluid fromage blanc en faisselle, one of Lyon’s specialties, which my three sisters and I would lap slowly, fighting endlessly over whether it was better with or without sugar. The Lyon I returned to had cleaned up nicely, shedding its provincial veil of grit and crime and acquiring a polished persona. My father had recently passed away, and perhaps, I thought, I could recapture a piece of his spirit in this city he had known so well. I strolled through Renaissance-era quarters, soaking in their soft coral glow, and peeked into age-old artisanal ateliers, searching for a glimpse of him.

Debutantes

Cynthia Litz — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:49:41 -0800

Seni is a foreigner from Gambia and is Mary’s roommate in the freshman girls’ dorm.

Resolution

Kay Eldredge — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:02:57 -0800

Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? he asked her.

Have I ever, since we’ve been together? No one keeps them.

Well—I have one for you.

Cartoon Art Volume 2009-10

Various Artists — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:57:02 -0800

Cartoon Art Volume 2009-09

Various Artists — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:56:01 -0800

Cartoon Art Volume 2009-08

Various Artists — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:55:11 -0800

Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:44:21 -0800

Mary Gaitskill’s first story collection, Bad Behavior, gave readers and reviewers a prurient jolt with its cast of women turning tricks on New York street corners, druggies, sadomasochists, and twisted office sex, followed by bribed silence. But the decadence and corruption were ultimately less remarkable than the frank, unapologetic manner of the stories. In conversation, Gaitskill invokes Nabokov as an inspiration, and she creates her works much as he created his Lolita, with “no moral in tow.” She touches the cold, dark, dreadful edges of life with perfect humanity.

Leach Pad

Nate Haken — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:30:14 -0800

It was the Danish guy from the embassy, not me, who wanted to hang out at this place, with soukous music and lots of Burundian girls wandering around from table to table under the stars. I had just landed that day, sleep deprived, in Central African Republic, and I’d been drinking for quite some time with Bokassa before the Danish guy showed up. So when I tried to talk about the systems dynamics of peace and stability operations and counterinsurgency, it came out garbled. “Cause and effect,” I proclaimed, “is difficult to ascertain. The only thing you can take to the bank is that external actors aren’t really external at all. As soon as Allah appears, he’s no longer Allah.” I was feeling philosophical.

The Danish guy handed me a business card. “Come by my office when you get back from the gold mine,” he said. I wasn’t making sense, and he didn’t want to entertain my bloviations on war and peace right then. He turned to the girl sitting on his lap and asked her where she was from. “I am musungu,” he said in French, trying to embarrass her. That was slang for white person. She smiled, not sure what his point was, and kissed him on the cheek.

He elbowed me. “You’re the big prize tonight,” he said. “American.”

Dim Lighting at the Afterparty

Dave Bausch — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:27:58 -0800

I was still drunk from breakfast. I was working on a poem called “The Blackest of Shattered Streets,” trying to breathe life into the last stanza. The first line read: “So I drift among the slate-gray concrete faces . . .” You know, New York sidewalk in winter as stand-in for a cold society. That was when Chuck, our regional branch manager, told me to take the rest of the day off. He said he smelled whiskey on me and was aware I was creating a work of art instead of counting beans like everyone else. It was the Commerce National Bank, where everyone wore name tags, drank coffee, and thought the same things. They flocked about in large numbers, as indiscriminate as seagulls in their white-collared shirts. I was never one of them, even before the divorce, when I thought I wanted to be. Since then I’d watched the years drip down my sides like candle wax, and now that there was almost nothing left, I was almost free.

East House

Joe David Bellamy — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:26:25 -0800

Every weekday starts out the same: getting up early and driving to the hospital, turning in at the green sign, chugging up the hill and the winding hospital road, slowing for the constructed bumps, past the huge, baroque administration building—wanting to turn back every minute, a palpable desire, but proceeding on past the construction site for the new day care building, past ominous-looking Appleton and the Women’s Nurses’ Residence, then into the cinders of the parking lot next to East House, in all its hideous Victorian splendor. I hop out, and instantly there is the sensation of being watched from within.

Often, on the night shift, I am the only male on the ward, and some of the women respond to me in sexual ways that catch me off guard. P made sure to “accidentally” leave her door open when she was taking her bath last night, and she knew very well that I would be making my rounds to check on her and the others in that wing. In the brief glimpse I had of her before I rushed away to notify the head nurse, P looked quite stricken, not because she thought she was going to get in trouble but, I’m sure, because of her disappointment that I didn’t stay to watch.

Best Advice

Kim Addonizio — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:08:15 -0800

I was whining. Picture a crippled dog dragging itself into the English office of a university where it teaches a single graduate poetry workshop in which the students disbelieve everything it says and consider their work immune to criticism, a class for which the dog receives little pay and no health insurance. Imagine its hind legs, useless. Of course the dog isn’t really crippled; it hasn’t been run over. But it feels crippled. It’s the dog’s version of an interpretive dance, to show you how it feels.

The Caterer

Ann Beattie — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:56:55 -0800

Moira the cake maker had a broken toe, and Caitlin Lee was recovering from an appendectomy, so Janet recruited her daughter, Blair, and Blair’s boyfriend, Steven, to help her load the Subaru wagon with trays of food, serving implements, and enormous bunches of peonies from her garden, along with a pile of nice tablecloths and some sparkly stars to scatter here and there and, oh, how many times had people’s corkscrews broken during a party? As well as the one in her Swiss Army knife, she put in a Cuisinart corkscrew that her clients always fell in love with once they’d used it and—really last minute—dipped into the bucket on the front porch and took out a handful of shells, carefully rinsed by Blair and Steven, because those might be nice too.

It had been a rainy summer in Maine, but finally it was almost July, and sunny. Everything was very green; Janet had to duck to get under the wisteria growing on the arbor at the end of the walkway, amazed at the amount of lavender petals scattered prettily over the path. No doubt some would be in her hair. “Get a move on,” she called back toward the house. The only response was from the cat, who darted up the stairs and went through its cat door into the house.

The Ninth Dream: War (in the City in Which I Live)

Benjamin Alire Sáenz — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:21:55 -0800

All my life—let me say this so you understand—all my life
I have heard stories of the river and how people were willing
To die to cross it. To die just to get to other side. The other
Side was the side I lived on. “And people die to get here?”
My mother nodded at my question in that way that told me
She was too busy to discuss the matter and went back
To her ritual of rolling out tortillas for her seven children, some
Of whom asked questions she had no answers for. We were
Poor as a summer without rain; we had an outhouse and a pipe
Bringing in cold water from a well that was unreliable
As the white man’s treaties with the Indians, unreliable
As my drunk uncles, unreliable as my father’s Studebaker
Truck. I was six. It was impossible for me to fathom
Why anyone would risk death for the chance to live like us.

Fever

Dana Levin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:17:12 -0800

Hot.

Motionless at the window.
Forehead beaded with a line of fevered moons, swelling

and then dropping
to the floor—

Parched.
Face flushed. Room flushed, red shadows licking up the walls,

the ceiling,
you briared in it like a rose on a spit, rubiate,

carnadine—
Breathing.

What We Learned

Ashley Skabar — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:01:33 -0800

Was never what we were supposed to:
the lilt of the living, salt’s savor.

It wasn’t the body’s bone-ripples, either,
or the sways of nurses’ crosses;
it was the truth of it all—
hunger’s chill,
the scream beneath the surface—
history’s echo tucking us back inside,
staring from the other side of the glass.

Second Anniversary

Meghan Dunn — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:59:08 -0800

Today, June 10, is the day for all who loved you
to gather in the park and raise money in your name.

Somewhere in town, a boy who matches
your description plays guitar and doesn’t care

The Bone Trees

Shane Lake — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:48:15 -0800

1.

The whole thing started
with one tree made of bone
an oversized femur
sticking up like a trunk
with more bones for branches
bones hanging like fruit
in the middle of a field
one of the few remaining
fields that nobody owns.
Word spread the way
it does in small towns
and the adults left
everything they were doing
forgot their children
in front of televisions
abandoned their laundry
in the middle of a wash
even left their windows open
and doors unlocked
fleeing to the field
to see the assortment of bones
tossing back and forth
like a skeleton wind chime
and they all stayed for days
just staring and laughing
a few people crying
but most of them dumbstruck
touching the slick white boughs
palming their undersides
as if to weigh them
hands heavy with calcium
until everyone fell asleep
woke up and dispersed
in no apparent pattern
like a drop of ink
in a glass of water.

2.

By the time people returned
to their homes
there were bone trees all over
filling backyards
tangled in clotheslines
and ruining swimming pools.
They popped up in rows
in the most troubling of places
some in the middle of roads
splitting the pavement
like miniature earthquakes
disrupting traffic
like deer
with wild antlers
sending cars and their drivers
up onto sidewalks
into telephone poles.
A skinny row of white
surrounded the doors
of the town’s library
so everyone gave up
reading books or listening
to them on tape
and just watched
the movie versions instead
because the video store
was two towns over
and not one single bone tree
had grown over there.
In the middle of a playground
they at first spoiled recess
until the children discovered
the bones broke off easily
and the boys were soon
chasing the girls around
until they grew dizzy
and collapsed
out of breath.

One bone tree grew
in the sheriff’s front yard
and he didn’t even mind
in fact
he loved the tree
more than anything
he had ever seen
in his entire life
went out each night
to sit on the porch
and stare at the thing
like it would be gone
the next day
bones glowing like ice
in the moonlight.

3.

Soon enough
people started looking
for someone or something
to blame
so they blamed it on the birds
dropping bones
from their beaks
for the jelly inside
but the birds said
no no no
we are just like you
we are just so hungry
for that sweet sweet marrow
and these trees
made of bone
are impossible
to build nests in
so why on earth
in a million years
would we ever
do something
to ourselves
like that?

Next they turned
on Mr. Peterson’s huskies
the three of them
best known for burying
bones all over town
walking around
with salivating grins
until they found
a new water hole,
but they denied
any involvement saying
no no no
it could not have been us
we know nothing
about gardening
and now there are way too many
bones for us to bury
and this town just bores us.

So the people were stumped
and spent the next several days
sitting in their kitchens
scratching their heads
and creating new sandwiches
until finally
the scientist spoke up
and delivered his theory
about how the whole thing
was a long time coming
that their secret histories
could be traced
to the roots
of their oldest trees
that fossilized and spread,
the earth beneath their feet
a pile of bones
pushing up
to the surface
like the buried alive
until one day
the ground cracked
and up came the bones
growing from the roots
growing into trees.

And after the silence
and after some thinking
everyone shook their heads
and no one asked questions
not wanting to offend him
because after all
they liked him
but he was only a scientist
so what could he possibly know
about this kind of thing anyway.

4.

Down at the church
it was panic and chaos
on a rather small scale
as Pastor Paul preached
to the ten people listening
that these trees were a sign
from the devil
a physical warning
of the terror to come
all because people
refuse to listen
to the word of God
and instead choose
to do things
like watch football
on Sundays
and look down
the shirt of the girl
at the grocery store
or spend all of their money
on clothes and jewelry
that they can’t afford.
Pastor Paul warned his crowd
and had Mr. Hall
throwing his arms
up in the air
shaking his head
and screaming out
noises to ward off
the bone spirits
while Mrs. Brown covered
the ears of her children
and headed for the nearest exit
as the oldest living woman
sat in her pew
and awaited instructions.
He then urged everyone
to move as far away
as possible in the quickest
amount of time
for the devil
was surely planning
some sort of invasion.

5.

Television crews
from all the major stations
parked their vans
in the town’s biggest driveways
and a fit of jealousy
swept across the country
once people turned on
their TVs and saw
what was going on
in this part of their nation.
People in every state
wanted trees
of their own
buried bones
once given to dogs
in the ground and waited.
Some towns tried fertilizing
their cemeteries
watering them regularly
hoping for some sort of reincarnation
but the majority of people
were just too impatient
and painted their trees
white from bottom to top
tying little chicken bones
to the ends of the branches
tricking themselves
into thinking
that if they looked quickly
enough no one could tell
the difference.
The Chinese claimed
to have been growing
bone trees for years
and just keeping it
a secret from us
like so much of themselves
but of course this was a lie
and of course none
of the other schemes worked
and when people realized
they could not have
what they wanted so badly
they were so angry
that they pretended
the whole thing
never happened
and went back
to making puzzles
and trapping flies in jars.

6.

A special town meeting
was called for a night
when the men did not bowl
and the kids did not
have to be put to bed early
and the number of people
that went was so great
that their shoulders were touching
and the room got heavy
so the doors were opened
and the people exploded
out of them onto the grass
behind the town hall.
They decided to move
to the high school football stadium
because at least it could provide
bleachers for them
while they argued
about ownership of the trees
most people angry at the few
who wanted the bones
to be dug up or bulldozed
and tossed into piles
at the town dump.
“You can’t destroy something
that is not yours”
was repeated like a mantra
and met with a reply
of “Yes we can.”
They went on like this
for hours on end
to no satisfactory conclusions
raising their voices
getting red in the faces
and clenching their fists
like they were trying to shake
the water out of a raindrop
until someone said plainly
in a rare quiet moment,
“Let’s not try to figure out
everything at once.”

7.

It was a long winter
in which most things died.
Not all things.
At some speck of history
people attached themselves
to the poor idea that everything
dies in winter
but it is only most things.
The bones on the trees
did not change color
or fall off
or get raked
into black plastic bags
with other bones.
In a farmhouse kitchen
a black kettle whistled
and it felt like all of our bones
were taken from our bodies,
stacked into freezers,
and given back to us.
Outside
the dogs were going wild
a whole pack of them
fresh from the woods
of another town
barking at the smoke
rushing out of the chimney
like a cloud
that looked like an alligator
chasing a child
across the great swamp
of sky
a child made of smoke
made from fire
made from wood
chopped in a yard
by a child’s father.
The child’s floating
was much too slow
and in one fit of smoke
he was crushed
into a scatter of bones.
Some people claimed
this was how the whole thing started.
Others joined the search party
but did not discover
any clues.
After four days
everyone gave up
and began tracking blackbirds
falling from the sky
but this proved too difficult
as it was cold
and the birds did not want
to be tracked.

“The Bone Trees” is Shane Lake’s first publication.

How Do We Bury the Dead

Mermer Blakeslee — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:46:13 -0800

how do we bury the dead
stacking up on the patio against our picture window? I can

barely see
over the last body blown here by another cluster bomb—
every forty minutes, every twenty, every ten, every five every four

every three every two every one—
I can no longer see into the garden

what do we do with all these children
lying here outside our kitchen