Innehållsförteckning för 219 (Winter 2016) från The Paris Review

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BUNNY SLOPE When I’m writing a poem, there’s less and less of it. As I approach the mountains, they vanish behind a gentle hill, behind the bunny slope. And once I’m standing with them face to face, they take away my speech. The very best poem finishes half way VANILLA BOY Sadomasochistic rain in Leipzig. It slaps the sidewalks. It sticks its fingers down their drains. It relieves itself in the city center, then washes away the evidence, so that on Monday the boss won’t notice anything. But the boss is no better, he beats his wife, who takes it as the usual marital tempest. I’m having a smoke in a hotel window, I stub it out on the windowsill, which reminds me of your back. Below there’s a young…

ALICE NEEL Recently Hilton Als has been choosing paintings for “Colored People: Alice Neel, Uptown,” a show that will open at David Zwirner, in New York, in late February 2017. He discussed his curatorial process with Lucas Zwirner, editorial director of David Zwirner Books, which will publish a catalogue based on the show. ALS One thing that has always impressed me about Alice Neel is that she painted so many people of color. I never understood why there hadn’t been a show of these portraits. I see it as diversity within diversity, meaning, how do you represent the diversity of the world you’re in—East Harlem, for example, where she lived. And not just African Americans, but the full scope of racial diversity. Alice was and was not a part of…

THE WAYFARER I was the father of two Young children when I started Plans for a long walk that became Shelter in my mind where I Arranged my things or chose Among unlimited potential routes Land and sky parting like Content in a trance I could Move west through I had been made so Any given morning brought Regret I should be unable To reverse my progress out of sleep Though both hands were asleep Fastened around the black Coffee that made me want to put It all into writing but why You know the taste The thought of sleeping Under bridges and drinking Coffee there appealed to me Autumn would have been perfect I had a hat with a brim Sandals that lasted forever A knife and a steel…

HILTON ALS is the author of The Women and White Girls. A theater critic at The New Yorker, he is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. TOM B ISSELL’s ninth and most recent book is Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. I SABEL FARGO COLE is a Berlin-based writer and translator of works such as “I” and The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig and Among the Bieresch by Klaus Hoffer. CYRUS CONSOLE’s Romanian Notebook will be published this spring. TADEUSZ DA˛B R OWS K I is the author of seven volumes of poetry in Polish. Black Square, a selection of his verse in English translation, was published in 2011. AMPARO DÁV IL A , born in 1928, was recently described in Letras Libres as “one…

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING It was a year of pirates in speedboats, anonymous bullies spreading privacies on the Internet, and the worst of them doing worse than that and wishing to be known for what they’d done, their perfidy an advertisement for a cause. Thus it was a bad year for historians, whose stories couldn’t be correct for longer than a few days. More than ever the imperfections of memory would combine with the slipperiness of documentation to produce versions only people who need not be persuaded could agree with. It was a war where the enemy sometimes was wearing the same clothes as its opponent, and both sides believed their cause was righteous, and years from now the victors, if we were unlucky, would tell it as it wasn’t, unless we…

CHRISTINE LINCOLN She was half the length of my little finger. A grown woman not much bigger than a bullet. My job was to keep her safe. A man’s mission, no doubt. So I ducked into this room whose ceiling was a planked, hardwood floor painted army-fatigue green. Everything had been turned on its head. Behind one of the planks in the corner was a hidey-hole. I stuffed the woman into my mouth, scaled the wall, and crawled inside. I could hear them in other parts of the house, rustling. My heart thumped hard in my chest. I tried to quiet it, but one of them, a girl, found the sound of my beating heart beneath the floorboards of the ceiling and followed it. I guess you could say my…

TAPESTRY The ruin we made of our garden Is confusing even today. Seven trees times three Planted for the first children Now dread covered. Bastards I could never have lived with Occupy that land today. My love cried when it lost Its place of rest. It died for me. It died for us. Gray apples, a rotten bone. Love and time that sucked on them. Water draws strength from stones And tries to move them And this way prevent erosion Of something deeper down That supports them all. We should have watered more. Or bought more hydrangea To decorate the groundswell Before the great flood Of warriors and moneymen.…

AFTER CALLIMACHUS These Telchines are called by some writers charmers and enchanters, who besprinkle animals and plants, with a view to destroy them, with the water of the Styx, mingled with sulphur. Others on the contrary say, that they were persons who excelled in certain mechanical arts . . . —The Geography of Strabo Tartarus’s footless offspring who spray fans of glyphosate mixed with Styx water over farmland regularly, technicians of os agrotóxicos for cash, I am weaponless against you, plus preoccupied by a to-do list longer than an epic—what you’ve done to my popcorn, my popcorn does to me, bowl after bowl of it as I take the documentary about you in in fits between dark washes and a trip to the True Value for drywall mud to repair…

AMPARO DÁVILA The train arrived at about six o’clock on a cold, wet November morning. The fog was so thick it was almost impossible to see. I was wearing my coat collar up and my hat shoved down around my ears, but still the fog penetrated all the way to my bones. The apartment where Leonidas lived was in a neighborhood far from the center of town, on the sixth floor of a modest building. Everything—the staircase, the hallways, the rooms—was invaded by the fog. As I climbed the stairs, I thought I was approaching eternity, an eternity of mist and silence. Leonidas, my brother, when I reached your door, I thought I would die of grief ! I had come to visit you the year before, during my Christmas…

ALASDAIR GRAY The Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, now in his eighties, lives in a two-room flat in the bohemian Hillhead neighborhood, near the University of Glasgow, where for many years he used to teach. Described by Will Self as a “little gray deity,” Gray is widely credited with blazing a trail for Scottish-identified fiction in the 1980s— although his books themselves have rarely encouraged imitation. His first major work, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, published in 1981, was thirty years in the writing and came in at nearly six hundred pages, including a false prologue, a false epilogue, footnotes, and a partially fictional “index of plagiarisms.” (The entry under “Burns, Robert” reads, “Robert Burns’ humane and lyrical rationalism has had no impact upon the formation of this book, a…

TOO MUCH When even getting a haircut seems too much, And trimming your toenails and fingernails takes too much strength, When more than you have is what’s required, At least that’s what you think, And even the thought of reading a book makes you tired, Then it’s time to get on your motorcycle and ride far out to sea And run out of money and blink SOS and sink. I was once in love myself. I loved politics in those days as well. Now I stare up at the sun. I stretch out on the sidewalk under the moon And greet each day as an adversary. I thought I knew everything, then I met you. It’s rather like how a bald man once was hairy. Everyone should be an optimist,…

TOM BISSELL The night before their appointment, they sent Haley one final e-mail in which they reaffirmed the when and where and tastefully restated their excitement. But Reuben managed to smuggle in a request: Would Haley mind wearing “normal clothes”? He was about to hit send when Brenna, proofreading over his shoulder, announced that his use of “normal” was, in this context, “problematic.” “Problematic,” he said. Their son had been asleep for an hour. Bren, looking at the laptop’s screen, only nodded. Reuben poised his e-mail-sending finger above the enter key like a scientist about to launch something toward Pluto. “Bren, come on. I’m sending it.” Bren paid this no attention at all, probably because she knew he wouldn’t send it, not without her go-ahead. “ ‘Normal.’ It just seems…

CLAUDIA RANKINE Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attende d Williams College and received an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. Since early in her career, she has crossed the lines of genre, creating books as unified projects rather than loose collections, peeling back the surface of the moment to get at the complexities underneath. She is the author of five books—Nothing in Nature Is Private (1995), The End of the Alphabet (1998), Plot (2001), Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), and Citizen (2014)—and has collaborated on a series of videos with her husband, the filmmaker John Lucas, some of which infiltrate her writing in the form of transcriptions and images. I met Rankine over three Fridays in…

ENTANGLE I prefer it to remain disorganized, because it is richer that way, like a certain shrubbery I pass each day on Reba Street in an unimpressive yard, in front of a home that seems unoccupied: a chest-high, spreading shrub with large white waxy blossoms— whose stalks are climbed and woven through simultaneously by a different kind of vine with small magenta flowers that appear and disappear inside the maze of leaves like tiny purple stitches. The white and purple combination of these species, one seeming to possibly be strangling the other, one possibly lifting the other up—it would take both a botanist and a psychologist to figure it all out —but I prefer not to disentangle it, because it is more accurate. My ferocious love, and how it repeatedly…

THE BEAR It’s too neat in here. Everything dangerous has been picked up, just some grit left underfoot. The shelves are ugly and next to them is a garbage chute leading God knows where. Entire pallet loads get dumped in there: 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, as boxes wind up on the charity van, back in the world. Some of it is shredded; some is crisp—laundered once, folded, never worn. I need to tidy up before the next of it surges in and needs to be sorted. The room is round, white, shadowless. I don’t try to make it beautiful anymore; the things that occupy it are already too beautiful. Tiny sand dollars, red leaves, fat green seedpods picked up from the path home from school—I put them on…

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