Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2018 från The Paris Review

IMPERMANENCE The first ending. And knowing it would endI wanted another. Lover, summer,pen with which to write it all down.The first disappointment. Which is notremembered but lives in the body.And how familiar it became. To takethe same walk home or lean over ledges,to say my own name when meeting someone.Again and again for the last time:the taste of salt in the afternoon.Flowers for no one—alive and sold on the street.What did I think was promised in being?The way a stranger can finish you off.Once only. And never the sameafter that. After knowledge.How people are being detainedand shot with our money.All of which cannot prepare us for deathof which I am a studentand which is this country’s business:the permanence of others.Even our cruelty toward one another.Will end. And I knowthat looking…

OFF-WHITE my boys & I refused to believe it was Michael who didn’t make it through the night even though the cameras strewn across the sky showed the mansion lawn specked with red sirens & from my own covers I imagined him to be simply asleep the way I slept with the red lights pouring into my bedroom windows in the summer of ’97 while the medics decided that my mother’s throat had closed & locked every door & they tucked her beneath a white sheet & to die in one’s sleep must be to unfold a dream that never stops unfolding & then it is hard to say where sleep ends & death begins & how close to the edge each night drags the unassuming lives it holds in…

62. Why such irony in re the mystical context when a graph of even the most commonplace exchange would appear perplexed; when we drop out from the plainest statement in the posture of a bat? So, decide to make something of that, the style to resemble an English Aeneid or Iliad. Do it like Dryden. No, up the bid. Do it as Wren did it at the Sheldonian, which is like Dryden in stone. You’ve always been a name-dropper. I believe I need them to charm away scrofula such as Sam Johnson suffered from. “Chronic enlargement and degeneration of the lymphatic glands.” Thought to be healed by the application of regal well-anointed hands. Dryden and Wren are kings; and English poetry has lately incurred something squatly debilitating to the strength…

THE GARDENER’S SCARF Fruitlessly you wait for the gardener to show up on the red bench where he has promised to meet you after his shift ends. You encountered him in the bathroom at the museum, and you followed him back to his botanical garden, crowded with statuary and obelisks, a thick-enough assortment tomake Peggy Guggenheim jealous, if she were alive and peering now through a window at you, who refuse to reciprocate her gaze. Avoidance tactics doom you and determine your fall from competence into a gutter cloggedwith torn back issues of ONE. The sculptures in the gardenhave more solidity—more conviviality—than you do, faded ash-blond melancholy man under a sky too pink for its own good, the pink of a wrestling match held in the white palace on the…

FROM LIFE I came from life from living I arrivedNowhere in the midst of God in the midst of GodGod is a city in which no one has ever livedWe live in houses like the houses we once hadSome in their first some in their lastI live in the house I lived in with my wifeThe first year we were married a small whiteHouse at the edge of campus it’s as ifWe never graduated never leftExcept she isn’t here and none of ourFriends but the friends who died so long agoThey aren’t our friends anymoreI do what old friends doAnd love them anyway we eat together at the Waf-fle House on Saturdays and wait all week to dieHow many weeks now I don’t knowExcept it can’t be more than threeThousand…

WALKING IN FAST-FALLING DUSK WHAT IS BETWEEN US BESIDES this sharpness of pines, this gravel loosebeneath us, faltering with each rustle, each step, with what we’re notsaying to each other—Now your flashlight’s beam anglesinto the thickness, dead petals the color of light honeyunfasten from their coppery centers, dark berries shineclustered above twig tips, above forked edges of leaves, aboveeverything unnamed between us I havenot forgiven—still overflowing toward us while stillarrested, suspended, in all the shadowsof everything I don’t know how to feelthat slant toward the awkward shapes our bodies make as wewalk over what may be moss or violets in the dark, overthings maybe veined or dank or thorned or nowbetween us, Can’t you slow down I saythough I am not falling behind.…

MACHO A man in long shorts had a tiny doghe tossed into the leaves piled at the edgeof people’s yards, the dogthe same brown as the leaves.Too small to barkit squeaked as it was tossed. I was seeing someone and we passed iton our way downtown. A street where boysstuck dollar bills over coils of shitthen watched who came alongand picked them up. Then they jeeredfrom the window. They were in collegeliving together. Girls lived together tooand it was warm enough you couldstill see them tanning on a roofor in the kiddie pools they draggedto strips of grass along the sidewalk. The dog’s name was Macho.Each time we walked, I hopedto see it. He found my hopeannoying, then pathetic.I think you wish you were that dog.No, I want it; I…

LITANY FOR THE GREEN When I was five, my grandfather took me to the tombof King Suro, lifted me over the stone fences and watched me slide down the mound overand over again. Did he do this because he was an old man, because he didn’t know where youngparents take their children, like the aquarium or the water park or the toy store? Or did hebecause he was once a child who never went to any of those? Was it because I was a child,who he assumed would enjoy sliding endlessly? And wasn’t he right? About how childrenconceive of time differently or that their imaginations work differently, and that every slide was, in fact,different? Or did he do this because he was an old man, who thought the only destination…

DEAR— I saw the crow first, on the shoulder turnedto mud, then its shadow, then the cage of bone arcing up from the muck. Januarythaw, the doe untagged, head intact—the rope looped about her neck, blue and man-made.Below the neck, the body emptied, the muscle inexpertly butchered, nodoubt, in some dark hollow, the ribs scraped a dirty gray—gristle and fat, the remnants.Look: all of this was out of season, the doe tossed on the roadside, the melted snow—even me, standing over the carcass, and why? The crow long gone now, and whatmarked the line between winter and spring?…

NOW SEE 1. Don’t worry. We have armiesof showrunners writing our dreams,ones where we’re featured as skilled apparatchiksfacing credible threats that appear and disappearlike clockwork, leaving no apparentdamage. 2. It was all oneto me— all pain-pleasure,all squirmy life-deathuntil your head broke the surfaceand looked backward and forward.Now see what you’ve done. PROBE No lie!Need input!Not ghosting you!Which coffee is best for wildlife? Are you going to get the monkey?Are you taking him to sister?No, you’re giving him to granddad. Everything we didwas tracked by sentences. Now we can’t stoptalking to ourselves. Worried about what happens. Just need a minute. We are allrooting for you.…

LESLIE JAMISON It’s the summer of 1966, and Sheila and Peter are a young married couple living in Berkeley. They are very much in love, and also very high—tripping on acid for the first time in their lives, in Tilden Park—walking in a shallow stream full of primordial monsters, or at least salamanders. The leaves are emeralds. The whole world is an amoeba. They are Adam and Eve, and they’ve found their way back to the garden. They are renting a room in a communal house from a lawyer turned drug dealer; a local character named Wild Bill painted on their walls during an acid trip, “Oh Lord, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have BAD…

SAM LIPSYTE The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next. From his debut, Venus Drive (2000), a collection populated by a string of outsiders and misfits (a tormented summer camper, a small-time coke dealer, a peep-show habitué and his comatose sister), to the near-future dystopia of Hark (2019), his fourth novel, the Lipsyte-verse is fueled by failed or failing relationships and the comically agonized involutions of liberal self-consciousness. His work is as endlessly self-correcting and unstable as Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, told with a compression and exacting attention to language that follows Stanley Elkin, Gordon Lish, and…

LOPHOBASILEUS ELEGANS MEISSNERI / CRESTED TIT-WARBLER / SCHOPFHÄHNCHEN [Collected September 29, 1934] he unsung me from sound scattered bright my red eye eyes unhooked now from the circle of cedar pine cedar silver the beetles went went silent then stonebite one bite burst the rhythm of the sky of a field of of air electric my azure wing grew wet though the pools were far i fell low lo losgelassen tief in deep in into some other night red night when his blue eyes his him himmelblauen augen lit his face the air ran an slick with blue-born breath he broke me down into a limbless nacht roter nacht a crest a crown a wing crushed no lichen-light no ze zeder branching no silbertanne verzweigt only red night now losgelassen…

III. Is belief, like love, first a touch, a feeling,an inclination toward rightness?But I have known—known—myself right somany times & been so, só wrong.Is it a mode of dying? Of benediction?Acceptance of suffering?It is benediction.I am ill. There is a candle in the dark,& I am standing at the rim of the candlelightbehind James Hickey. James Hickeywho had a script I would have killed for,that I sweated to copy—fluent & expressivein turquoise ink they only toleratedfor him; whose voice singing “O come,O come” held a scale of clarity & completionthat was emptiness, self-extinction:perfect. James Hickey, as thick as muck,barely able to long divide, or parse, who gavenot one high fuck for poetry or English.Yes, he was beautiful. I have hated beauty.Lord, when will I sit at yóur left handEstoy en…

HERNAN DIAZ Pushed from its hidden end, a sofa drifted into the parking lot under my window. The pushes became feeble thrusts and then short convulsions, until, with a final spasm, the couch nudged one of the abandoned supermarket carts by the trash containers and came to a rest. It looked almost new. My apartment was barely furnished. Silence. I rushed down. As I was getting the sofa out of the elevator, sweating and mumbling curses to myself, I met the tired eyes of a big Viking-looking man in felt slippers, a sweat suit, and a wool hat fitted in an upright yet loose Phrygian style, with a break à la Smurf. “Sorry I didn’t give you a hand,” he murmured. “Oh, thanks, I’ve got it.” The sound of a…

PAT BARKER The writer Pat Barker lives in the small city of Durham, in northern England, behind a blue door in one of the rows of nearly identical brick houses in the city center. She’s just a short walk from the famous Norman cathedral on the terraced banks of the river Wear, and less than an hour from the town where she was born. Barker’s husband, David, who died in 2009, taught zoology at the university here, and the couple’s son and daughter live within driving distance. This slight remove from literary high society suits Barker, who has pursued a singular career. Her start was with the feminist press Virago, writing tough stories about the kind of working-class women she grew up with. She then turned to the past with…

KELLI JO FORD By the glow of the headlights, Reney counted again. A calf was gone. A bawling cow trotting ruts into the fence line confirmed Reney’s count. She shoved her work gloves into the back pocket of a pair of Wes’s greasy coveralls. She’d slipped them on over her underwear and a Dairy Queen polo, and now static electricity popped as she climbed into the idling diesel to get the shotgun. With new babies dropping by the day, neither the feral hogs nor the coyotes would be far off. The hogs had pretty much planted a flag and declared the rooted-up land around the river their own, and the coyotes had grown brazen in the drought, killing two neighbor dogs and countless goats down the road. Still, she didn’t…

HANIF ABDURRAQIB is from Columbus, Ohio. His new collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, is forthcoming in October 2019. RAE ARMANTROUT is the author of Wobble, Partly: New and Selected Poems, and Versed. HERNAN BAS creates works born of literary intrigue and tinged with nihilistic romanticism and old-world imagery, capturing the transitional moment between boyhood and manhood. The artist lives and works in Miami and Detroit. SARAH BLAKE is the author of two poetry collections, Let’s Not Live on Earth and Mr. West. Her debut novel, Naamah, is forthcoming in April 2019. HERNAN DIAZ’s first novel, In the Distance, was a winner of the Saroyan International Prize for Writing and a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. ALEX DIMITROV is the author of two…

LINCOLN MICHEL Onstage, I’m thinking about the postman who was so overwhelmed by the amount of mail he had to deliver that he threw it all, and then himself, into the sea. I’m thinking about the agoraphobic grandmother who refused to go outside, even when the fire started on the floor below. I’m thinking about crying mothers, refugees fleeing crumbling cities, and infinite human hatred. It isn’t working, but I’m weeping anyway. It’s just muscle memory at this point. I go through my entire act. I rub my hands together on the lip of the foot-high stage. I moan beneath the fluorescent lights. Every now and then I squeeze a clump of hair and mime a howl. I finish by dropping to my knees on the sticky floor, a small…

1. Because cemeteries are too priceyI would like to be deposited on a public benchand not in the earthbut in the middle of Septemberat the end of wonder:wrap me in newspapers, darlings,and run! I want to live my deathon a public benchnext to a barbershop—die when it is time to cut my hair so I can save four dollars!I was always happy in barbershops.Now happiness,come blow your nose in my hands— I want to die on a public bench—those who watch me inthe streetsaysomething in him wants to be entered and picked clean. Be careless, life!Wrap me in newspaper on a park benchso some enterprising schoolchildcan filch from my eyestwo dimesand replace them with two U.S. postage stamps. 3. From a park bench I watch my pregnant wife chase pigeons…

AMERICAN LANDSCAPING, PHILADELPHIA TO MOUNT VERNON Who would have thought—too much simultaneity:The Swan Planters hovering above the windbeatenStatue of the Virgin Mary who casts her gaze downOn the Repainted Lawn Jockey, his brown faceSpreading out over his white cap, a small rebellionOr, merely, an inarticulate hand overzealousIn restoring Race back to its place in God afterWinter makes heathen the heaven of horticulture.This is America calling: the golden pollen of SpringBlinging every available sedan, stone porch, puddle,And satin blouse hanging from a smiling white lineInto yellow salvation, or forgetfulness, a black dog,Antique in its hunger for my daughter’s hand through a fence,My daughter, in her machine and wonder, willingTo give. It is as if every moment is prayingFor whatever is above it or just outside of its grasp: the dogFor a…

LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA Two sisters lived together in a two-room apartment. They were very poor. For lunch, they usually had a boiled potato; for breakfast, a slice of bread with a glass of hot water. They were very thin but very neat, and kept their home spotless. Every day they went out to look for cheap groceries—for them, it was a multihour, breathtaking adventure. In addition, they visited their local library once a week to exchange books. They also knit their own sweaters, socks, mittens, scarves, and berets. For yarn, they used moth-eaten woolens people left in the trash. On their walks, they occasionally picked up useful items—a wooden crate or a pile of old magazines with recipes and home remedies. With all these activities, their days were full to the…

SATURDAY And according tothe stranger first ice sheets will thawsea levels willrise you read the stranger said toheights unheard ofshores will smother previous neighbors no onewill weather wellthe earth’s peevish heat will increase airitself septic streetsbridges unbearable the old ready routes—routesof childhood—routesof recall—now a dream unnavigable Whatwas the wayyou once would take to call onthe one youloved which way did it begin againit’s gone aweintact perhaps but face it the strangersaid we’re goingto need new ideas you read we’regoing to neednew tactics strategies for endurance don’t ruminateon sinkholes watersupplies toxins massive unknowable truly undivinable fracturesin the brittletectonic masses Oh delicate underworld Oh greenchild You onceplayed orphanage What is this game anddid you playit—it’s orphanage and you would peacefullyenvision—Oh grimychild—that everyone you knew thus farat this smallage was dead—what’s dead—mourn yourparents—sweet…

SELF-CARE While watchinga movie with a lovely, unyielding,Well-founded black female Character, the ten-year-oldSays, Mom, I love How fierceBlack people are. He’s read thirty-six graphicNovels in two days. (I don’t know howTo parent him. I only know howTo protect him.) My intestines gorge red.Warm. I smile at him. Pretend I don’t feel this green leaf of relief, a leafBecause he’s managed somehow Not to hate himself. Me.A girl’s neck was slit Yesterday. Everyday.We watch her die On the platform.…

TONY COKES, 5%, 2001, 10:00 Pop Imaginaryreturns and ascending grayand green squares, against which gray and green textspells again pop.Touring? Famous? Reacting tosurvive the pop“i don’t want to displace reality”—theattemptto himself, to justifyhis art world Itsmusic“i just wantto stay awake and have ” inthis video, Cokes takes but givesthe form to someone else. EPHRAIM ASILI, MANY THOUSANDS GONE, 2014, 7:38 is that we should begin in transit, in or near a vessel,as we do here and then we leave this place andthe skittering quality that follows festive scene, songandunaccompanied by diegetic sound, has been replaced by this near-music, robs these scenes of their reflective instead;the whole in this mood Maybe it makes more sense to call it near-silence, visually, a richness we learnthe musician is Joe McPheethe record of his…

BROKEN THINGS Morwenstow You stow them to the rear of worship: bits of jagged iron,candle nubs, miscellaneous gears and levers, each perfectunto itself but useless apart from its fellows. The humanback is meant to bear this weight: cable spools, dustyvases. Here is a picture of Christ, and here is a picture ofChrist. Imagine the eyes first, oblique timepieces uponwhich vision prints. I cough up a tooth, mature and perfect.It glistens in my hand. The chancel remains locked,nursing its treasures with a dim milk. I can just feel thetooth resting in the center of my palm; I shift it slightly,its planes mazing the half-light. Is it broken, I ask myself.Is it worship. Every century or four someone scrubs theimages from the walls and replaces them with new images.A fish. A crown.…