Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i The Paris Review

PETER ORNER After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it. I didn’t hate the job. I’d sit in the Kroger parking lot and read. If the dispatcher radioed and I liked the sound of the call, I took it. If I didn’t, I went on reading. My indifference didn’t make me popular with Ovid Demanaris. I once asked him, over the radio, whether he’d ever read Ovid, and he said he didn’t answer personal questions. “He’s got some real smutty stuff,” I said. No answer, dead air. I didn’t have to drive a cab. I was broke, and the…

MOTHERS I ONCE WAS Mother fingers in the mud. Mother begging bowl.Mother lace weaver drumming her web, babieseating her whole. Bleachable mother. Mother apronsmeared with blood and flour. Mother flower. Mother Florida, the wet bone. The marble throne. Mother sent back.Mother bent back curling like script. Mother dependedon light. Mother? Depends on the night. Mother for whom the whole sky. Mother hiding in the curtains, humming too loud.Maggot mother at the shroud. Mother thought it possible. Motherwas wrong. Mothersong. Our Lady Mother of Wet Beds and Aggressive Disgrace. Mother persimmon, name soundsthe way she tastes. Mother, with all of creation fattening.Mother who held on while it was happening.…

KATE ZAMBRENO BLANCHOT IN A SUPERMARKET PARKING LOT There are three elements to the photograph. There is the grocery cart in the background, the white Renault hatchback in the foreground, and then at center there is the reclusive philosopher who explored literature’s impossibility. This is one of only three photographs of Blanchot widely known, the other two from when he was much younger. No doubt Foucault was referring to him when saying that surely there were others like him, who wrote in order to have no face. Amazing to have lived a life and to have authored so many books yet to have avoided being photographed, or having the photographs circulated. Except here, in his fragility, when he probably least expected it. Not even when he resurfaced to support the…

HEBE UHART Once, I was asked to be on the organizing committee for the Buenos Aires Book Fair and to coordinate a roundtable discussion among writers. The topic had already been chosen: rural and urban literature. The invitation was printed on the letterhead of the Ongoing Commission for the Organization of the Book Fair, from Authors to Readers. It was a great honor but I was reluctant. I didn’t know anything about the subject, I don’t know the first thing about coordinating, and one of the writers invited to take part was a priest who talks on the radio and travels from province to province on an evangelical mission. He wants to do away with the antiquated stereotype of reactionary priests, so he tries to copy the way kids speak…

THE TRICK IS TO PRETEND the ladder keeps going. The black dust that peels the paint off your car is on each rung. Don’t touch your face. I imagine police with spotlights, a system to hunt my geolocation, the whir of a drone. I had dark lines across my feet, deep scars— where did they go? The game is who can avoid interrogation, who can split themselves into a hundred coded squares, lines in alternating directions going… I want to enter this country like the rich, with the swipe of a card, a scan of the face. But they required a stomach strong enough for chemical labor. I climb knowing the only way down is by falling. Police paved a concrete square to catch me, men wait with high-powered hoses…

INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE PANTOUM When I woke up, I did not listen to what the poem told me to write downI was being led into a defused pachinko shrine guarded by dire wolves The poem claimed its author was Yellow Money and that everyone was actingfoolishlyRain-cloaked streets, dirty underwear posters, and stenciled exhaust pipes I was being led into a defused pachinko shrine guarded by dire wolvesThe poem added a softcore soundtrack of copulating lizards falling to earth Rain-cloaked streets, dirty underwear posters, and stenciled exhaust pipesI joined the rubbish collection and became a bag of rusty bread The poem added a softcore soundtrack of copulating lizards falling to earthThe advance notices were awful but still we continued trekking through thesnow I joined the rubbish collection and became a bag…

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI As we conducted these interviews, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was ninety-nine years old. By the time this is published, he’ll be one hundred. Simultaneous with this milestone, Doubleday is publishing his third novel, Little Boy, an autobiographical stream-of-consciousness novel that his publisher would prefer were a memoir. For while his 1958 book A Coney Island of the Mind has sold over a million copies, Ferlinghetti is not simply a famous poet; he is a counterculture icon, known for his association with Beat generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and for City Lights, the bookstore/publishing house he cofounded. There are few peaks he hasn’t scaled as a public figure—talking to the New York Times is as nothing to him—but the prospect of a Paris Review interview still appealed…

STUDY OF TWO FIGURES (ORPHEUS / EURYDICE) was it that / that glance / backwarddownward / so evidently / an afterthought the body / enacting / its relentlessperpendiculars / as if to say / this place where you / abide / this is nota place / I can abide / this is a hell to me / the exit / trajectoryof the body / the declension / of the head congruent / to tenderness / congruentto condescension / as if to say / you must keep up / I will not / staythe eyelids / half-shuttered / the gaze aslant / as if to say / askancewas it that / that glancing / that angled glance / that pinned you / to youreventuality / the body / an exit staircase…

Within 電 a field poetics:sky, rain, lightning over la milpa—components in the symbol electricity. A lasso enlazados,an analemma tracingthe migrant dagongmei & ensambladoras from ruralfarms to city factory,working circuiting electrons. To help with my poem,she gave me her needle-nose pliers,the ones she used on the line: a finer pairof fingers to tune or awl—they thread image & song, seam signals, hemHertzian waves, handwork—warp & weft—the Web. With spool of tin solder& hot iron over circuit boardhow might she resemble retablistas in market boothswho condense a votary’sdifficult story & infinite thanks with oil paints on tin sheets?Miniaturists of modernity,how they work the solid state to archive divinity & amplifymessages—doy gracias—acrossthe heavens. Charges apply. Devout commissions—comote llamas—a supplicantin her rebozo, a border crosser & his duffel at their votiveemitters: calls & flames…

SARAH MANGUSO I used to be interested in mountains. They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up. It was like that all my life. Then we moved to California, and after eight years of earthquakes I began to doubt my ability to put things in order. I began to distrust the very idea of order. The mountains were no longer guiding me. On the acupuncture table, waiting for the doctor to return and take my pulse again, I think, I need to write one scene at a time. I can make a list, and then just go scene by scene. It seems like such a great idea, and when I get home and sit down quickly before I need to pick up…

STATES OF DECLINE The room is dying honey and lemon rind.Soured light. My grandmother sits in her chair sweetening into the blue velvet. Domesticdeclension is the window that never opens— the paint peeling, dusting the sill, and inhaled.It is an american love she lives in, my grandmother, rigored to televangelistsand infomercials. Losing the use of her legs. Needing to be turned like a mattress.No one is coming for her. The dog is asleep in the yard, her husband,obedient to the grease and garlic in the cast iron, salting herdeath in the wind house.…

THE REFUGEE CONSIDERS THE FAUCET after Pamela Argentieri’s “Continued Persistence” O arm that spurts flowers,Branch giving birth to water.O tree that bows down And stays there, hoveringBetween sky and ground.You anchor us to now. We have walked so longOur home has narrowedTo the width of our shoes And what we can carry.And yet you, still animal,Hollow metal Conducting an internalConvo with movement,You are endurance In the still momentOf beginning, you areAnticipatory beauty, O instantaneous river,Compressed creek,O brass wellspring, Invisible lake, O slake,Oasis in a tube, taproot,Song of the mute, I bow To you, and hold my handsLike a shallow bowlBeneath your mouth.…

THE TRANSITION an erasure of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Old King’s New Jester” Your eyes, furtive, see faces obscuring sight. Your wrongChanges our dialectic regarding unstudied contrition. These reduced daysTravel, vague but not with a determining must-knowGlamour. You may give a returning ingredient one last— THE INTERACTION an erasure of “The Letter” by “Currer Bell” Now fingers eagerly bend light aside. That touch slips, falls, falls, pursues The deep sun. Caught unclothed, the light comes. Is that messy stair Tall? Around leaves glows a clustering dance of still, earnest fingers. Her Task: write. Ask her where hangs that dark, dark sky that may Yet flower. If one turns distinct, the broad but faintly stalwart face Locks. A furrow might tell a picture and a letter. The tearful Tears see in…

NICK FULLER GOOGINS GUARDIANS Many of us demand a living wage. Others demand health insurance. At least one of us demands some dress-code wiggle room. (I for one am sick of wearing black.) We all demand hazard pay on New Year’s Eve and Saint Paddy’s Day and the night before Thanksgiving. We demand set schedules. Reimbursement for our protein powders our gym memberships. An emergency fund for those stabbed on the job. We are the doormen of the city. The guardians against Nightworld. Yet the nightclub owners they reject our demands every one of them. REAL DOORMEN My doorman brothers are angry. They want to strike. I want us to remain the calm professionals that we are. We are meeting at the gym our usual spot. My doorman brothers boo…

THREE GHOST STORIES: 1944–48 Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village. A motorbike was coming from the opposite direction. The driver of the motorbike had no head. It’s because the wounds were so fresh. That’s why he was still driving the motorbike. He must only recently have been beheaded. Was this during the war? No, normal days. The lorry driver got so scared, he swerved and crashed into a ditch. How old were you? Five. Tell me another story. Imagine a beehive. It hangs from a branch like a sling. It’s pouring rain. Chacha-ji is getting married. After three days, he has to take his bride back…

YOU’RE GONNA WRITE THIS but which verbs do you employ when it’s clear that you are tryingto side-eye murder your mother, when you are the chilling moral of every blazing honor thy Sunday sermon, when you are nothingless than blasphemy blown wide? How you do lift the bleating cell to your ear when what you hope to hear is an awkward coughintroducing some industrious RN’s practiced coo, an I’m so sorry to inform you followed by a flat trisyllable twang, the Alabamaname of the woman who spent years drilling you with grammatically hilarious tenets and a Gospel so austere you wet the bed believing it?All you remember of those unrelenting lessons is a sky-eyed white man poised to both consecrate and slap you sinless, and a heavenspewing feral light just…

ELVIS HAS LEFT THE HOUSE The raccoon got up on the roof and wouldn’t come down. I threw rocksat it and it danced between them. Finally I decided to get my shotgun.I got a ladder from the garage and climbed up on it. Then I took aim andfired. It danced like crazy, but I missed and tore a hole in the roof.Denny, the little boy from next door, came running out of his house yelling,“Don’t shoot, that’s my pet raccoon!” I turned on the ladder and stared athim in disbelief. “All right, you can have him if you can catch him,” Isaid. He stood at the foot of the ladder and said, “Come here, Billy.” Andto my amazement, the raccoon came down and nestled in his arms and they walkedaway…

KAVEH AKBAR is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College. JOHN ASHBERY (1927–2017) was an American poet, critic, and translator. His last collection of poems was Commotion of the Birds. RICK BAROT’s next collection of poems, The Galleons, will be published in 2020. MALACHI BLACK is the author of the collection Storm toward Morning, a selection for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets Series. ROBERT BREDVAD is a food and still-life photographer based in New York City. GARRETT CAPLES is the author of Power Ballads and Retrievals. He is also an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. FRANNY CHOI is the author of…

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER They all knew him although no one in Bałtów spoke to him and he spoke to no one. Maryan Skiba had served a prison term of eight years for killing his girlfriend, Zocha, because he caught her in bed with a city hall official. Maryan was a fisherman. After his release from the Lublin prison he returned to his former trade. There was a lake around Bałtów that had carp, pike, and tench. It belonged to a nobleman who permitted the fishermen to fish there for a fee. All day Thursday, and Friday until noon, Maryan would stand in the marketplace beside his tub of live fish. It was impossible to haggle with him, as he had almost ceased speaking. He muttered the cost and no one…

CARL PHILLIPS Since the publication of his first book, In the Blood (1992), Carl Phillips has generated a body of poetry that is singular for its demanding intimacy, its descriptions of the dissonant energies within a self, and its beauty. Phillips has now published thirteen books of poems, which have situated him among the most influential of contemporary American poets. Phillips’s poems wrestle with themes that seem especially urgent today—identity and race, sexuality and sexual politics, morality in human action and thought. But his poems also feel coolly adjacent to the present, as though—like other poets of great interiority, from George Herbert to Emily Dickinson to Li-Young Lee—he is thinking about timeless questions. If it is often the case that poets, over a life of writing, become more autobiographically revealing…

J. JEZEWSKA STEVENS For our honeymoon we went to Tuscany. This got a big sigh from me. I love my job, this city, my life. At home, in our apartment, the kitchen tiles are a deep maroon, a chess-board for girls. I was sitting on them, like a squat little knight, unwrapping a casserole dish, when my husband wheeled a suitcase into the room. One of the most difficult things about being married, I find, is that those thoughts you choose not to say out loud don’t register at all. No one reads your mind. He gently snapped two fingers near my face. Babe, he said. You look a little dazed. THE FIRST THING I DID when we arrived at our villa was set up my salves and creams and…

AMID RISING TENSIONS ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA Your country’s memory is short. But know this: We live, have been living, with this threat staining the earth we still call home to mark what happened. The choices made in the dry mouths of children, sewn straight into our breasts. We live—have to live somewhere. Why not smother doubt to save the family we’re responsible for. The only sunlight is this story spun from the records, and we’ve taken its name as our own. Yes, we sob and shudder, yes, and feed our babies, We can still hear the planes, their death-knell hum—circling our heads like we were carrion, despite the pictures, which know only how to tell one truth at a time. Our names were napalm, ravaged paddies, lung cancer. Names,…

SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA Mary believed there were two kinds of people in the world. There were those who were seen and those who were not. Mary considered herself the latter. She hadn’t lived in the town for long, only a few months. It was known for its beaches. It swelled with tourists during the summer and then was quickly abandoned. There was no bar or café open by summer’s end. She liked the town empty. Mary preferred her own company. She was thirty-six years old, living, with no pets, in a small house painted white. It was one of many white houses in the neighborhood, painted that way because of the intensity of the sun. The one she lived in had a flat roof. It wasn’t a place that needed to…

MY BITCH! after Nicole Sealey o bitch. my good bitch. bitch my heart.dream bitch. bitch my salve. bitch my order.bitch my willowed stream. bitch my legend.bitch like a door. your name means openin the language of my getting by. bitch sesame.let’s get together & paint our faces the colorof our mothers if our mothers were sad mensoft only in bad lights. let’s swirl the deep grape& coffee pencils until we look like odd planetson our way to looking like the daughterswe secretly were. caked & cakes hairyjust short of grace. we look terriblewhen we’re the most beautiful girls in the world.bitch my world. bitch my brother. bitch my rich trust.i’ll miss you most when they kill us.…

EX PATRIA (fifty days at iliam: shield of achilles) a mythology begins with a question like who are we, where are we, what is red, why paint, why me, lord, why? a person who knows all the answers can only borrow a mythology like i’m king midas or i’m god. a painter can take a mythology and remake it so that it answers a new question like romare bearden asking odysseus who are my we? and cy twombly asking akilles why are we still you? painting the i of the storm on a shield. cutting the trickster out of black and blue paper and lashing him with glue to the mast of his last ship. the journey always rough, some miserable god under land under sea always looking for company,…

MONSOON Scoresof scorpionshoney-bright scorpions twistcounter-clockwisearound my bodysaw-toothed pincers shredmy jeans & shirtwhen I’m stripped completelyall but twoscorpions stop clatteringthey scramble upmy left arm & shoulderpress tack-sharp legs against the arteriesin my neckI slowly reach for themexpect a fewbloody sparks but insteadof scorpionsmy thumb troublestwo warm lettersinitials his initialsthe scorpionsrattle twist clock-wise this timesaw-toothed pincers cutinto my skinI refuse I refuseto speak his namethe scorpions honey-brightcome to a haltraise their tails a bead of poisonglints on the tipof each stinger the small bonesin my tonguebreak it startsto rain Poem borrows language from La Maravilla, by Alfredo Véa Jr.…

8. LIGHT ARTICULATION OF THE LEFT HAND He could understand the things at home.—Wallace Stevens, “Things of August” Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desireof many dwindles to usand our “activities,” wholesomeor otherwise. Soon it becomes apparentthat neither they nor I have any prise on the fabliau’s demands of unity.We are aching neither here nor there.The tent caterpillars shrug off the tent, and proceed. Was there a maxillary half-buried in the silt?If so, what were we doing in earth-heaven?Times came to be, trembledon the tilt of a sword’s point and slid offinto the grass. See, there was no warranty.It’s not like stuff you send away forand it comes and you can’t rememberwhy you ordered it. These, our time, were like grain,necessary and inedible. In time the minute palace got chucked.…