Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i The Paris Review

MARY TERRIER The month after our mother died, our father began bringing women home. It felt like a behind-her-back kind of operation. “I’m going to have a guest over tonight,” is what he would say. David and I stayed out in the living room, turned up cartoons, burned toast, kicked our feet up over our heads. I worked long division. At some point a woman would emerge to drink a glass of water or fix her hair in the kitchen window’s dark reflection. The guests left behind nubs of lipstick in gold tubes and leftover food, paper pouches of cold french fries, chicken legs in clamshell Styrofoam boxes. They left tampons blooming through toilet paper in the trash can, like tiny mice they’d killed, the cotton tails pink with blood.…

RICHARD FORD All the senior partners were having a laugh about a movie they’d seen. Forty-Five Years. Something, something about the movie taking forty-five years to sit through. The woman McGuinness thought he recognized was in it with them at the far end of the long table. Leaning in, as if hearing everything for the second time. “Miss Nail!” they were calling her. “What do you say, Miss Nail? Tell us.” Laughing. He didn’t know what it was about. She wasn’t tall, but was slender in a brown linen dress, a tailored dress, that set off her tan and showed her lean body. She’d glanced past him twice—more, possibly. A flickering look asking at first to be thought accidental, but could be understood as acknowledgment. She’d smiled, then looked away,…

LEWIS LAPHAM It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has largely avoided. For the past half century, he has been getting pretty much equal esteem in a pair of distinct roles: editor and essayist. As an editor, he is hailed for his three-decade career at the helm of Harper’s, America’s second-oldest magazine, which he reinvigorated in 1983; and then, as an encore a decade ago, for Lapham’s Quarterly, a wholly new kind of periodical in his own intellectual image. As an essayist, he was called “without a doubt our greatest satirist” by Kurt Vonnegut. By the…

FRAGMENT I would like this poemto be a machine.Concise, metallic,a counting apparatus.A means to keep each momentcontained and fixed, akinto a series of Polaroids,photographed and fixedto cardboard or some otherpaper-panel backing.Then photographed and affixedwith Scotch tape to the wall.Or, a vitrine, a glass case,within which to gather and collecteach moment, each objectrepresenting each moment.A bundle, assemblage, or archiveconstructed of letters and notes,diary entries and fragments,articles and photographstorn from books.A machine that measuresthe space betweenthe body and the mind,the dissonance that existsinside that moment. And there,in that static, in the rip,the mar, the errorbetween, is where,when it begins, it willbegin. PHOSPHORESCENCE Photographs of photographs and Polaroidsof stacks of books on fragmentsand photographs and pamphletson letters sent and imminentcollisions. What the body does not knowit wants. And the mind.In the song I…

ALAN FEARS After what feels like a long winter and a complicated spring, let’s admit to an intense longing for summer’s simple pleasures: those divine evening breezes; those long, sharp shadows; an insistence on slower-paced living. Burned shoulders and mosquito bites be damned, we still crave it all. British artist Alan Fears craves it all, too. Having given up on painting for nearly twenty years, after traditional art school programs left him bogged down by formal theory, Fears returned to his brushes in his late thirties. His reputation has been steadily growing ever since. In 2018, he was short-listed for the John Moores Painting Prize, England’s premier contemporary painting award, and he contributed work to the famed Summer Exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. He now devotes himself entirely…

CALIGULA after Suetonius Caligula ordered the night city illuminated.Every stoop, porch, or balcony was a stage. He made the senators dress as prostitutes—tight silk skirts, paste-on eyelashes.Up to a matron to wriggle into a boy’s shorts. Marcus Severus, one-armed veteranof our labyrinthine border wars,had to hobble into the amphitheaterarmed with a plume and attack a lion. A plume! We were fascinated.We were all players, who was the audience? The emperor chose me, me, me, and me,and slept with us. He was passiveas a bedpost, but listed his demandsin documents we had to sign in advance. Slaves—who had been stockbrokersor insurance agents a moment ago—carried triremes on their backs to Rome.Sails billowed above our seven sacred hills. Would it ever end? We were enthralled.Every breath is a sagawhen you long to…

THE SECOND AMENDMENT Driving out to Long Island over the Williamsburg BridgeI spot the young white men on the rooftop.There’s a bottleneck as the ribbons of feeder lanesMerge, and the boys on the roof laugh, one of themCradles a mock rifle, another cocks his thumb and forefingerInto a pistol—the way of cowboys and Indians, the way of kids,Wishes whistling, aimed and fired—the driver with the hijab,The driver with the dreads, the driver with the darkest skin?Burst water balloon, hacked limb, fucked-up puppet, cut free. The boys are not quite ready. This is not the day after the dressRehearsal, the day someone regrets putting on a bright hat,Or zigs instead of zags, or wisely detours the paradeOr street fair, then wishes they could drive the afternoon backTo its tame beginning and…

RAVANA after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46) Dressed simply but notwithout elegance, holding ritualstaff and parasol Radiating gloom, like an asteroid with designs on a starlike night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earthlike the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosionslike the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohinilike Saturn advancing on Chitralike the forests and cities and far ridges of infinityeach planetary body with its moons each moon that governsa forgone set of miserable inhabitantslike the afterglow of a gamma-ray burstlike the coma of gas that covers the nucleus of a cometlike comets, dirty snowballs, signing the skies with their angerlike the coronal holes stirring in solar windlike clouds obscuring double stars of dwarf galaxieslike the Doppler reading suddenly shifted into the bluelike the black…

LYDIA DAVIS This morning I walk around the house feeling happy and I’m struck by what I’m doing. Actually, I’m struck by only one gesture I happen to make, but that one gesture inspires me to write a sentence describing what I have just been doing. This is usually an effective approach in writing because one striking element can be the culmination of a series of more ordinary elements that would not stand on their own. So I go to my notebook, which is lying open beside my “official” work—a typed and nearly finished story that needs three or four changes. My notebook always lies beside my “official” work because I write in it most when I am supposed to be doing something else. So today I write down a…

THE FIFTH HOUR OF THE NIGHT The sun allows you to see only what the sunfallsupon: the surface. What we wanted was what was elsewhere: cause. Or some books say that’s what we once wanted. Prophets ofcausenever, of course, agreed about cause, the uncaused cause: or they terribly did. Asleep, I struggle to stay inside sleep, unravaged byheart-piercing dreams—craving, wish, desire to remain inside, if briefly, obliteration. I cleave to the voice of Poppea’s nurse:oblivionsoave. Not frightening, the wordoblivionas Oralia Domínguez, hauntingly clinging to the sound, in 1964 sings it. Eating today, however satisfying, frees no creature from having to eattomorrow. Sun cyclebuilt into us. It’s because you are an animal with a body. Howeverfilling. As soon as adolescent sex ended this hungerthat you had not known was yours until…

RUSSIA I reada book &then I wantto readanotherone aboutRussiaabout the bathtub. I thinkRussia’stoo muchlike me dry& cruel. Bluewild cerebraldour. The poetsthere havebeen brainwashedby theteamof whitepoetsprecedingmewho explainedthat inamericaeverything’sconfessionalexcept them. Myintentionwas tomuddlethrough myreadingnot muddle butwanderexplainhow Ilike a mindlike a spaciousnessthat hungersfor moreand canget lostinsideyour therenessfor days TASHA She prefersmy phone & using mycomputerw out the burdenof her lifelast nightI describedit opena circleshe kissesmy kneeits lifethat ismy namethey thoughtshe hada lotI thinkit’s enoughI meanit’s astonishingif I had (his)I couldfeel everythingbut as it isI knowwhat it isI love yourlips. TO LOVE Do youonlygo to newplacesis it truedid theplanetjust getborn you in yourlittle legsand Iam in mytreeam lovethe babycrying isthe bouncingplanethe strangewindthat killedBob all of itis trueand I inmy rotam havingthetimeof mylife.…

APPROPRIATE DRESS Dear you know who you are: You must be so relievedto have, at last, the weight of my affection off you.Feathery at best, a cloakfor warmth, simple affection. Gone are my fingers through your darkspill of hair, the silken skinof your shoulder aglow in the light of candles,your electricity, the flickeringflame, the small knob of heat on a wick, white noise,your breath breathless,heart-scented, echoing your pulse,racing once, now stilledto the gentle tapping of residual waterhours after the rain,hours after the storm. MISTER SNOW “An almost perfect beau …” —Carousel She doesn’t think so much about the boatsDrifting back at sunset from the fieldsOf fish—rubber boots and sunny slickersAgainst the spray and mist of the expiring day.The water antipellucid, murky and cold,The revenue of the nets now aboard. She…

JONATHAN ESCOFFERY If you’re the only son of uptown Kingston parents, then you will have options. You can take Daddy’s Datsun or Mummy’s new ’68 VW and fly past street urchins who sell bag juice and ackee at red lights down Hope Road to pick up Reyha or Sanya or Cherie. If a Reyha you pick, you will carry she to the drive-in where you can stroke she hair while unoo watch Bond ’pon big screen. Reyha’s family own the bread shop on Barbican Road where she work most afternoons, and you like sniff she hair since it always smell of coco bread or spice bun. Is Cherie you like slow whine plenty nights down a New Kingston, whether Epiphany or Dizzy. She tease you, you see? Push up hard…

In 1939, with New York City playing host to the World’s Fair, Fortune magazine dedicated its July issue to commemorating the event. The issue would be divided into four sections: The People, They Govern Themselves, They Earn a Living, and What Is This City? The project required seventeen in-house writers and eight editors to capture the breadth of the city and its people, from Harlem to Wall Street, and the magazine turned also to a former staffer they regarded as their finest writer, James Agee. He was tasked with composing “tone poems” to introduce each section. In the end, Fortune editor Russell Davenport chose not to run the prose poems, or the foreword that Agee wrote to open the magazine. The reasons remain unclear, but none of Agee’s work for…

THE PLEDGE Yesterday I kicked a treea walnut fell in a gravenobody got hurt it’s Junethe Februaryof summer alone in Oaklandcleaning white ashfrom not-so-distant fires off my windshieldwith my sleeveI think of you far, old friend,scribbling poemsin the park to your wifeand saying themhappily to no one do you rememberwhen we pledgedto always look? we were sadderthan Chinese poetsof the Northern Song like themin desperate timeswe drank a lake sized amount of wine,which made us strongbecause we knew no matter how mucheverything mattersour poems can always be read by anyone…

SAMSON, 1674 for John Milton Their theaters cackle and bray, their carriagesclutter the streets: cockades, torches, liveriesclash. Philistine heartsjocund and sublime, they smear their deals gold on columns and cornices. Temples fumewith burning fat. The choicest girlsparade with kohl-ringed eyes and spangled thighs.Let the poor creep into shadows: they offend. The prisons teem. And one old mansits in his doorway in a loose gray coatletting sunlight lay its palms on his sightless eyes.He’s seen too much. Kingdoms askew, skies collapsing, idols crammed back into shrines.Let the mad cavalcade pass by.There’s a kind of defeat that resembles victory.There’s a temple raised up only in the mind and another to be pulled downin dream, arms wrapped around massive pillarsto tug and shatter the roof on guzzling lords.Not by his arms, not by…

BODY. HISTORY. EVIL. GOD. HUMAN. I. So it is, the chaoscontracted in an unfolding scenein five sentences: Body. History. Evil. God. Human. II. But what ideas,in what facts? Inside the sun the heat is suckingthe soil’s moisture, a blue-and-redDiet Pepsi logo is imprinted on a lobster’s claw,flashes of lightning, steady rains complicating the identificationof bodies charredto bones, Town of Paradise a fire zone,anywhere is everywhere. And in another intensity the GreatMigrations of Peoples, ecocidal petro-capitalist qualitative destruction,every cubic meter of the planet’s air,inch of its surface, drop of water,affected; and, now,endless wars,and proliferating sorrows.…

[I’LL GO PLANT THE TREE OF MY GRIEF] I’ll go plant the tree of my griefin the wetlandsof silence close to her grave I’ll live in lantanashrubs I’ll turn away from the sunand the dayso I’ll hear only the timbre of her voicein the dead of night [I WANT ONLY TO BE A WORN-DOWN STONE] I want only to be a worn-down stoneon the ruins of time,a dolmenraised above this forsaken graveyard’sterrain [AND HERE, THE REMAINS OF A FIELD] And here, the remains of a field A path withstands the onslaught of fernsMushrooms growon contorted limbs of a felled rônier palmHandles of pruning hooksA large aluminum cooking pot overturnedat the edge of the gulchits lid lies a bit farther off … TwigsAshTwo blocks of flintfor inventing fire ……

MORNING to Antonio M. Cubero The flags sang their colorsand the wind is a bamboo shoot between the handsThe world grows like a bright treeTipsy as a propellerthe sun sounds reveille above the terrace roofsthe sun rips mirrors with its spursLike a playing card my shadowhas fallen flat on its face on the roadUp above the sky fliesand birds furrow it like wandering nightsThe morning comes to settle fresh on my back. “Mañana” was first published in Ultra, a Spanish avant-garde magazine. The poem appeared in issue no. 1, January 27, 1921, and is one of the writer’s earliest published works.…

FRANK BIDART is an American poet and academic currently teaching at Wellesley College. In 2018, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986) was an Argentine poet, essayist, and fiction writer. NANCY NAOMI CARLSON is the writer of nine titles, six of which are translations. CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of five collections of poems. Her first book of prose, Disquieting: Essays on Silence, was published this year. LYDIA DAVIS’s first nonfiction book, Essays I, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this fall. She is also the author of The Collected Stories, as well as translations of Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. POLINA DECKER has taught at Brown University, Bard College, and Ohio University. CORNELIUS EADY is the author of Brutal Imagination…

SOMETIMES I STUMBLE No one ever leavesthe building across the streetand I can’t explain whyI spent the summerstaring at its blank windowsand stony facade, its caged trees,while the sun crawledacross the light-blue emptinessyawning with clouds.I was stunned by griefinto silence, inner muteness.But then one afternoonI decided to give upmy watch.Sometimes I stumblein shadows, sometimes I tripover the last stair of the house,but now when I strolltoward a prospectmy spirit liftswith the stirring of nightjars,the first whip-poor-will of evening.…

AFTER TRUMP “Nobody knows the system better than me.” We talk most days, but today he sounds far worsethan he’s sounded since they died.I think he should call our old shrink. I say:“Call me back after you call the shrink.”He hangs up, waits ten minutes, calls back.“I did it,” he lies, “but her servicesays she’s away. What do I do?”“I don’t know,” I sigh, “shall I take you in?”By in, I mean to the ER. “Will they talk to me?”he brightens, “Give me emergency talk?”“If you’re planning to die,they’ll drug and admit you. Are you?”I ask, pretending to assess him.“No,” he answers, deflated, dropping away.“No gun?” I tease. “No pills?Oh,” I say, “do you hear voices?Other than your newly dead parents,your whirling-dead, barely dead parents—are there voices?” I’m crueland cruelty…

HERE WE ARE Here we are at last, meeting face-to-face like two heroes of opposing armies, looking each other in the eye, poised to shake hands. Do you trust me? Do I trust you? No, trust died last century, along with truth, so we’ll have to think of something else to shake on. Not to our health. Our health is bad and only getting worse. Not to our wealth, because no amount of riches could heal our poverty. Not to you and yours. Not to me and mine, because yours and mine, every last one, perished in the wars, and without yours there is no you, and without mine there is no me. Just two bodies standing face-to-face, two envelopes of flesh with nothing folded inside. How did we survive?…

SANTA MONICA Five o’clock on a crisp, star-clear winter evening,sun just sunk beneath the oyster-blue Pacific Ocean,a panoramic swath of reflective foil rippling incessantlyas if ants were crawling everywhere across it.Coastward, the dramatic graph line of the Malibu hillsdiminishes with distance to the north and west, so thatthe underlying equation of which it is an expressiondepicts a miraculous rise of improbable good fortune,an ascent that crowns the city in laurel-scented peaks.Somewhere in this deco matrix someone is having great sexwith a Ukrainian model hoping to become a movie star,and someone is getting ready to rob a liquor store,but mostly the TVs are on, domestic window lightscasting their guppy-blue glow against unforgiving hills.Sky toning down now toward melon-rind and umberfrom the citrus colors of a moment ago—they movethat fast, our lives,…

WHAT TO SAY WHEN YOU IN YOUR BODY are not comfortable beside mine. On the bus,pulled forward by gentle inertia,a hundred of us sway, or sigh, is that it,what we do in the moment, in that airthat is too cool. Listen,I want to say to you, dear heart,imperfect flesh, blue eyes,abused elbow and plaintive knees—listen, I want to breathe inthe world that is falling apart.I am too old to learnyour name in any languageother than this one. I amen route. Almost there.Not home. In the sky,there is a dark bird, going away,and what can I imaginebut its exquisite lotof danger? In this story. This day.I’m ignoring you, boyin silken shorts, redand so wrong and too close to my face.Once and not so long ago,maybe Saturday, whichwas another life, a whole…

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS What’s worth happening happens in deep woods. Or so my daughter tells me. Her plotlines: In the deep woods someone is chasing, someone else is getting hacked. Hatchets are lifted, brought downdowndown. Men stutter blood onto snow. A cast of animals—some local, some outlandish—show up to feast on the bits. “The bitty bits,” she’ll say, “the tasty remainderings.” Good luck diverting her. Good luck correcting or getting a word in once she gets going. It’s gruesome, but this type of storytelling, I’ve been assured, is perfectly normal among children her age. I have a fat stack of books concerned with the inner lives of little girls. I have glossy pamphlets, full-color articles I’ve taken from waiting rooms. Her stories may be distasteful, but my daughter is happiest…

THE ANABASIS OF GODSPEED I. Now these were the embarkations they made to the HOLY PLACES of EGYPT SINAI PALESTINE and SYRIA in the years of furies 1916–17 unto the last 1918. Godspeed under the schoolyard’s cherry tree scrawled his anabasis marred by dust and the red smell of the sea. II. Disembarked for ALEXANDRIA shuck camp and enchained at MOASCAR and proceeded to EL FERDAN where it DECHAINED and proceeded to REDUIT camp where it encamped and took over duties and post defenses in the sun. III. And was shuck off the strength accordingly. ENGLAND. Heavy-clouded. That was the month of the death of the late Field Marshal Right Honourable H. H. Earl Kitchener of Khartoum K.G. G.C.B. O.M. G.C.S.I. G.C.M.G. G.C.I.E. Colonel Commandant Royal Engineers Colonel Irish Guards…

LAURA VAN DEN BERG I first saw Karolina outside the Sumesa on the corner of Avenidas Oaxaca and Álvaro Obregón. She was smoking a stubby cigarette, a sled-like backpack hitched to her shoulders. I stopped short, felt my heart lurch. Could it be? Karolina was my brother’s ex-wife; they’d divorced five years ago, in Seattle, and I’d not seen her since. Right before their divorce, she had gone missing for fifteen days, an event still marked by dread and shame. The second time I saw her was by the bus stop on Avenida Michoacán. The third sighting was in Parque México, late at night. I had decided to walk back from a work dinner in Roma Sur to the hotel because I was having trouble sleeping and a long walk…

FRANK BIDART For more than forty-five years, the poet Frank Bidart has lived in a third-floor apartment on a quiet street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Harvard Square. An avid collector of culture, he has slowly relinquished more and more of his living space to piles of books, CDs, and DVDs, which now stand chest-high nearly everywhere in the apartment; only a narrow path leading from room to room remains clear. These piles are monuments to enthusiasms: they’re layered with complete works and exhaustive catalogues, and are evidence of a taste that encompasses everything from Sam Cooke to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, from Looney Tunes to Carl Theodor Dreyer. The impression one has, surrounded by his collections, is of being inside a curious, refined, voracious sensibility, a sensation at once disconcerting…