Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2019 från The Paris Review

EMMA CLINE There isn’t much in the house,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.” Kayla looked around, shrugged. “I’m not even that hungry.” Mary set the table, bright Fiestaware on place mats alongside fringed cloth napkins. They ate microwave pizzas. “Gotta have something a little fresh,” Mary’s boyfriend, Dennis, said cheerily, heaping spinach leaves from a plastic bin onto his pizza. He seemed pleased by his ingenuity. Kayla ate the spinach, took a few bites of crust. Mary poured her more water. When Kayla asked for a beer, she saw Mary and Dennis glance at each other. “Sure, sweetie,” Mary said. “Dennis, do we have any beer? Maybe check the garage refrigerator?” Kayla drank two over dinner, then a third out on the porch, her legs tucked up into the oversize hoodie…

WILLA C. RICHARDS Alice read John Mark’s letter, her eyes narrowed, as I paced our tiny apartment. The envelope contained instructions for retrieving two sets of human remains from the University of Florida. I sometimes worked for John Mark, the director of the Milwaukee Public Museum, in exchange for modest paychecks and access to the museum’s research collection. I often did the jobs the museum interns refused to do, like retrieving artifacts originally accessioned by the MPM from other institutions and bringing them back to Milwaukee. I hadn’t taken one of these jobs since before Tess was born, afraid to leave her or Alice, but we were so poor we had begun to eat only the casseroles Alice’s mother sent over in weekly batches. Alice tossed the letter on the…

When a student who feels stuck on a writing project comes to see me, I often suggest they unsettle their form. Why not try pushing your story into a place it doesn’t belong? I ask. What if your family history could be, say, filtered into a life insurance claim? Can you rewrite this bad-date tale into thirty interconnected limericks? This is merely an exercise to move their narratives away from the classic arcs and tropes that often hold storytellers hostage. Rejecting prescribed forms helps us locate the impulses that require something weirder, I tell them, stroking my invisible beard. A few students end up doubling down on the ill-fitting forms and revising their projects around them, which creates another issue. That new form, I warn, can’t be a perfect fit.…

HISTORIAE 2 The book rotted by the rain, the clay that’s slipped,the earth screeches, plates collapse,the walls lose their grip on the paintings,nothing is aligned like the planets we think we understand.Within the shock announced this morning by the howling dogstheir muzzles pointing toward an imaginary swarm of beesthe floor slides toward the void. We, too,run away in the wake of a memory of the species(oh, storm made of fire and basil,of lamps and beds askewand you, mountain, gulping water and air)while the house breaks up and disappears. [PINDAR SAYS THE POET MUST GUARD THE APPLES OF THE MUSES] Pindar says the poet must guard the apples of the Museslike a dragon, but I grew up among Christians,I pierced my dragon side by scraping off the scalesthe way I clean…

MY DEAR LOVE, Mad March dreamsof crane flowers,birds of paradise.Strelitzia reginae a deft cutof bird and flower. Sunbirds perch and powdertheir breasts with pollen—pollinators who sail the season.(A rare plant who prefers birds over insectsam I.) —V MY MY MY, The wide sweep of today.Books, flowers, and poetry. Woolgathering and trees.The wood garden is fervor, a blaze of primula and anemone.The poplar is passion, viola-resonant, my vibrating footfall. Not a weed in sight, lupines and irises, perfect turf.The Hugh Dickson under the bedroom window—my classic hybrid tea, my repeat rose—buds patience and patience. —V OH DARLING, Midges and tetchiness.A constantly muddy mood. In my impatience for mail it strikes me that the perianth is a floral envelope—a cloak concealing the reproductive organs … Alas, I forbear. A capacity for waiting…

KATHRYN SCANLAN The cat was dying too slow. The vet could end it but the vet was thirty miles away and the cat hated the car. I called the vet. Could I get it—what he used? Could I pick it up and bring it home and do it to her—by syringe or pill or however one did? Can’t let you have it, said the vet. He told me the drug he used was the same drug a person will drop in a date’s drink in order to rape the date later. I could go to jail, he said. Well, I don’t plan on raping anyone, I said. The vet said, Does your husband own a gun? He did. At the end, he kept it on the bed next to him…

WELCOME THE STRANGER Would shy cereus or sugar gliderswing-shift foreman or taxi driver,call the day betterthan the night? Or say the moonhas only one side,that which we can see? Is a dollar worth moreface up in a palmand less face down? Who would wish for onlya right hand?Does anyone still call the leftsinister? Look closely:a flame is not all light.Only broken selves possess no shadows.Do not trust thosewho live in halves,who would shut allthe windows and closethe doors. Welcome the dark strangerwho calls in a storm. Warm the soup on the stove;break a fresh loaf. Sit, and allow your eyes to adjustto your companion.What seemed a monstrous voidbecomes a shivering figurecaped against the rainor sheltering in a mourning shawl, perhaps a chimney sweepfresh, as it were, from work, or a…

ANTONELLA ANEDDA is an Italian poet. The pieces in this issue are from her 2018 book Historiae, which won the Premio Carducci and the Premio Citta di Arenzano. RAE ARMANTROUT is the author of Wobble, Partly: New and Selected Poems, and Versed. KAMAU BRATHWAITE is a Barbadian poet and scholar and a cofounder of the Caribbean Artists Movement. JACOB BROMBERG is a multimedia poet and a contributing editor to The White Review. His work has been shown at Le Monde and Palais de Tokyo, among other venues. MOLLY McCULLY BROWN is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and the essay collection Places I’ve Taken My Body, forthcoming from Persea Books in 2020. PATRIZIO CECCAGNOLI is an assistant professor of Italian at the…

THE PIANIST When my right hand—When the hand that had been mine—When I found that handcurling inward stayedcurled protestations meant nothing; prayers.Thinking, not thinking—nothing. But there was a literaturefor the left hand, there was someone before—his arm blown off in the war. And what was over was notwhat I thought was over— from the beginning, my relation had beento music, not myself the player— Incurable, desirethat survives as devotionno disfigurement can cure. I became a teacher. Hand placed over—Sometimes I place my hand overthe hand of the player very gently or forcefully, in sympathy. LATE SELF Rembrandt, 63 The surprise alwayssomething has not abandoned us, the way, standing there, another’s expression as you realizehas become yours— Self given, self seen— Suffering composing itself is compassion.…

GEORGE SAUNDERS My first meeting with George Saunders took place in his home of ten years, a ranch house in the Catskills. The house stood on fifteen acres of hilly woods, crisscrossed by narrow paths that he and his wife, the novelist Paula Saunders, had cleared over many afternoons, following mornings spent writing. The Saunderses had lived in upstate New York for three decades; they raised their two daughters in Rochester and Syracuse, two of the region’s Rust Belt cities, and Saunders’s first three story collections, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), and In Persuasion Nation (2006), are marked by the experience of bringing up children and holding down jobs in a postindustrial economy. But the stories aren’t constrained by the conventions of gritty realism. There are ghosts, zombies,…

CORAL for angeliQue brathwaite this living liqurid mmemorydeep tidal embankment under the waterbreathes through the sea’s leaves like lamplight dreams itself a green island lizardlong before you was bornbranches of blue into tunes of blue crystalsoftness of turQuoise and terrace and moon where there is still no sound of the sea. where no wavesbreaking white. because you was not yet bornnot yet turning to morning inside of yr mother’s womb where you sing unthorninto a soft pale noom/as the sunreaches you slenderly. slenderly. on what is becoming reef how each of yr still dead shellstouches the sheath and the shoulders of silencehow each wave-hiss of gleam is beginning in wonder how each delicate touch dictates an answering glitterhow each shape eschews shape like the young leavesof a tree for. sak(e)ing…

[RIPPED APART LIKE A DAISY ORACLE] ripped apart like a daisy oraclehuddled in the empty arms of your real estatei turn you over in my mind as on a spit blistering like a rubyat night set in solitairei picture my bodypocked with assay marks your must seeping outtit and tat for an important from your walletcameo: still lifeof the will i wade into the shadowi— you’ve left on the walland you wrench my mindto pleasing draped in yourredundancies phantom limbsof dandelion promiseshave me installed on the lawnsurrounded by prolapsed flowersand the homelessthrowing pennies in the water in another lifei’d have locked you awaybut even in that life i hold my eye to the keyholeand sigh and how quickly you’ve become a stranger…

RAE ARMANTROUT Independent, skeptical, laconic, and always lyrical, Rae Armantrout is a poet of wit and precision. Her poems are typically built of brief sections and short lines in which every word and syllable has been carefully weighed and placed. She also values alacrity and surprise. Arcs of argument can end midflight or spring abruptly in unforeseen directions. The tone shifts, and shifts again. The rewards of her quicksilver verse are many: she helps, as William Blake once put it, to cleanse the doors of perception. You look anew at everyday things and delight in language’s myriad marvels and traps. You also laugh out loud. Her poems often bring together contraries. She shuttles from topics as ambitious as cosmology and theology to things as ordinary as weeds glimpsed out a…

SIBERIA To survive, Siberia, or to survive Siberia:neither seems possible. So cold, so boundless,so wild there are parts as yet unnamed. Prairie of ice. Forest of ice. Sea of ice.My hand reaches over valleys of Siberian pineto touch your body, blind as a moonless night. MIDSUMMER there was blue smoke beyond the house a fieldat day’s end slow darkeningin the tall corn our children scurriedinvisible in the maze voices absorbedby evening’s onset their voices echotime’s blue subterranean smokedrifting the sun’s lowered gazedrops behind the mountain now just stars CODA You waited at the station entrance.I was late. My hair had turned graybut there you were, all the snow gone,all the leaves blown, the leopard sunhaving leapt across a life never lived. My gaze falls on your black eyelashes,the black silk…

MOLLY McCULLY BROWN I never have any idea where I am. I lived my whole childhood in the purple foothills of the same five-square-mile town and I still couldn’t tell you whether you turn left or right on the single thruway to get to the grade school or the grocery store, or how to find the houses of any of my childhood friends. I can’t tell you how to find the conspicuously modern angles of the apartment building in the small Mississippi town where I lived for three years in graduate school, or even easily direct you from my old house in Austin to the bright little bar where I wrote much of my first book. I never know how far I am from the airport or the highway. I…

Cover: photo by Rebecca Fanuele, courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard. Pages 60–79, courtesy of George Saunders; page 88, photo by Chloe Aftel; pages 92–94, 104–6, 109, photos by Rebecca Fanuele, courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard; pages 97, 107–8, courtesy of Dave Hardy; pages 98–99, photo by Michele Alberto Sereni, courtesy Studio la Citta–Verona; pages 100, 102–3 courtesy Galerie Jeanrochdard; page 132–35, reproduction sans exclusivite avec l’aimable autorisation de Mesdames Richardson et Saluden, c Indivision Richardson Saluden (Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal); pages 142–74, courtesy of Rae Armantrout; pages 208, 211–14, courtesy Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York; pages 211–13, “Torcello,” by James Schuyler c 1960, 2019 the Estate of James Schuyler, Raymond Foye, Executor; pages 215–16, James Schuyler Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego, text by Helen Frankenthaler c 2019…

ANCESTORS Chance progression Genomic drift Split-apart generationsof the uprooted tree abandoned the tablets for another ethos Ancestors never spoke of our ancestors watching over throughthe great-great-void behind the incense and flowers brought us here In this quiet roomto learn from the old and make the new Hakgojae 學古齋 Gallery, east of the JoseonPalace of Shining Happiness young and old stroll in hanbok cosplayunder full autumn sun coco capitán mirrors herself outside west gate filee inks the stillness rite on a Buamdong hill siren eun young jung channels the yeosonggukgeuk with anomalous fantasies her reinventions of the forgotten 1950s women’s theater, lostmemories performed through dance and song, her impulse Hakgojae a practice of living artas a dream of a living presence Drawn into the wood across the sea of stone one…

THE CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS Off in a huff, I missed, almost, the moral of a dancer, the Eve of all such, ever, how she could hover concentric, how a firm but flexible expert in form can work miracles, foil awhile the drag and fall. I missed, almost, how much she must have ached, how late, to win her flight through skill and school to mastery’s mysteries. THE FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY In zigzagging overhead cablesstrung with ornaments,in trash, in residual playbillsfor holiday events,in rain and the silver unsplendidghost of a winter sun,sorrow for something ended. Pack it up, boys; we’re done. A truck has crushed a kazoo;there’s barf on a stenciled pane;confetti is eddying througha gutter and down the drain.And, damn, that plastic hollywreath on a real gum…

FERNANDA MELCHOR They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Girl Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch. If she’d had another name, scrawled on some timeworn, worm-eaten piece of paper maybe, buried at the back of one of those wardrobes that the older crone crammed full of plastic bags and filthy rags, locks of hair, bones, rotten leftovers, if at some point she’d been given a first name and last name like everyone else in town, well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had ever heard her called anything else. She’d always been you, retard, or you, asshole,…

L’ÉTERNITÉ Venue de l’imperceptibleconvexité de l’oeil—ce par quoi on sait que la terre est ronde—l’éternité est circulairemais plate le coussin est (montagne) érosionle tapis pénéplaine il n’y a plus de déchiruredans l’espace ni dans moi : le monde avant qu’il ne seplisse, une ondulation d’herbesentre l’est et l’ouest ETERNITY Manifest from the imperceptibleconvexity of the eye—that by which we know the earth is round—eternity is circularbut flat the cushion is (mountain) erosionthe peneplain carpet there is no longer a tearin space nor in myself : the world before itfolds, a wave of herbsbetween the east and west une ligne imaginaire va parcourirce balancement oblique on sait que les eauxs’y partageraients’il y avaitde l’eau mais il y a seulementcette soif de pliure des silhouettes se superposent le long de cette arête…

ARRAY A human beginsby claiming to be something else: a red birdin a picture book; a little redCorvette. This is known as captureor entrainment. How will she splitthe differences? A stream systemseen from above; tuning-fork twigsin winter forests. THE NEWS We wanted to tell someone everything (or everyone something)— how large and limp the leaves were in the half-sun, but what is “half-sun,” finally? ∗ We’d been “relaxing protections” in our sleep again, it seemed. Now we were fewer. ∗ Some imagined Saint Peteras a special concierge or a supercomputerlistening— did he listen?— to what he mustalready know, hearing onlyones and zeros, pluses and minuses. ∗ Was that at least something? ∗ Over and over, first one tall stalk and then its twin dips westward and recovers That’s my storyand…

TAYLOR KOEKKOEK I was staying at Jean’s apartment in LA for two months to escape an especially dire Oregon winter and to test how much weight our relationship could bear. We had been conducting a long-distance romance for nearly a year then, back-and-forth visits and weekend excursions, spending all our money on the effort. All-the-time texting, everyday emailing. If we performed all the steps in our elaborate ritual, in exactly the right order, it was possible to conjure the other; to feel, rather than eight hundred miles apart, as though we were separated by a wall, a closed door. Jean happened to be better suited to this than I was. She possessed first-rate powers of object permanence; she was uncommonly kind and endlessly receptive to inspirations of beauty too minute…