Interview In Empty Mirror With Ecuadorian Translator Carlos Moreno [Carlos No] (Clara B. Jones)

https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/literature/carlos-moreno-no-translator

Review of Alejandro Albarran Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems (Clara B. Jones)

Cowboy & Other Poems

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco

tr. Rachel Galvin

2019

Ugly Duckling Presse, Señal Chapbook Series

18 pp

$7.00

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems, Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

It is not every day that one has an opportunity to review a poetry collection destined to become a collector's item. However, emerging Mexican poet, Alejandro Albarrán Polanco's, Cowboy & Other Poems, translated by Rachel Galvin, is such a text. This handsomely-crafted chapbook is issued by Ugly Duckling Presse, a small, non-profit publisher located in Brooklyn, NY, committed to offering avant garde poetry and other genres produced by a volunteer editorial “collective.” As described online, many of the 300 titles published since incorporation by Matvei Yankelevich, Yelena Gluzman, and Filip Marinovich, among others, in 2002, “contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking,” a practice, the “codex book,” traceable back to the Roman Empire. Cowboy & Other Poems is part of the Ugly Duckling Presse Señal initiative, “a chapbook series for contemporary Latin American poetry in bilingual editions.” “Señal” means “sign” or “signal” in Spanish, and, in the present project, seems to suggest words communicated intentionally for verbal, including, semantic, and sensory, as well as, aesthetic, impact. As expressed on the press' website, “we publish what we love and what cannot find a platform elsewhere.”

Polanco, a poet, musician, editor, director, and conceptual artist, has received several awards and grants for his writing. Galvin, a poet, translator, and scholar at the University of Chicago, is a co-founder of the international creative translation collective, Outranspo. Cowboy & Other Poems, a hybrid text, is comprised of six innovative poems, including an image of firearm parts, and a translator's note. The poems are beautiful in their formal features—especially, image, rhythm, music, and lyricism—exhibiting sonorous and poignant elements. Though, in my opinion, Polanco's “voice” is not nihilistic, the language is “indeterminate,” as if he is saying to us, “The situation is dire, but I do not have the answers.” In the first, title, poem, “COWBOY,” “the world is no longer enough” [3], and, symbolized by “a prosthesis,” the prototype of a reckless, wandering, unmoored man travels

on this sea rubbed raw by the coast, on a raft that

you can pull apart and with its two parts make a cross that

flaps like a flag, like the waves of this bilious sea, this sea

from which a sacred body's scabs emerge, from a swell-

ing. This raft on which I float is a stump and I'm riding

it cowboy-style, riding my stump over the bile, people

will say they saw me mounted on a white swan, they'll

say that they saw me, but it will be a lie, it will be my raft,

the stump-raft I ride, and I too am a stump... [4]

Using the signs, “stump,” “mutilation,” and “prosthesis,” Polanco begins his book by introducing us to the spectre of loss and erasure, a theme continued in the second poem, “CONFUSION”—“Did he throw himself into the river?” / “Yes, he was confused.” [5] Both poems appear in experimental form, employing prose, unconventional lineation, and varying use of capitalization.

The third, untitled, poem is introduced by a two-part drawing of a gun and bullets, a foreboding image, again, of loss and erasure—taken one step further into method. Partially-appropriated text accompanies the image, and we are warned, “This bullet is not a bird. Although it invents itself in the air.” [8] Continuing themes of erasure and, now, death, poem four, “HEAD OF A DEAD MAN,” is inspired by an ancient stone statue. This poem appears to be entirely appropriated with erased components and sentences situated irregularly combined with other “defamiliarized” elements mentioned before.

Poem five, “Posthumous Instructions for My Body,” is dedicated to Peter Handke, the controversial co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. This piece is crafted as a conversation between two individuals—the deceased person's “voice” [Polanco's?] and the listener/respondent. This poem is one that would appeal to Handke, capturing his sardonic mien: “First of all crush // all // the bones // until they're compacted.” // “And then?” // “Then (after you cherish them) // char them well // until they become powder (after laughing louder).” [10] A footnote includes information appropriated, no doubt, from corporate advertising, about a process to transform ashes of a loved one into “authentic diamonds,” “a one-of-a-kind way to reencounter the intact beauty of your beloved.” [11]

The final poem, “Multitasking,” is a 5-part prose text including dark content and “dark humor,” as Galvin has described Polanco's sensibilities [“This party is fun, right?” (15)]...

2

Something's coming, I know that something is coming. Perhaps

a storm or a caste of birdmen with cassocks, but something, a

fistful of fists, a grain of salt on the tongue, is going to come. I don't

know what, but something is coming […] a hurricane

of marmots, a gang of winged tigers, a bird that vomits bombs... [12]

Polanco's Cowboy & Other Poems left me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth combined with feelings that, while it is important for radical poets to disrupt the status quo, we must be wary of negativity and defeatism. On the other hand, in her translator's note, Galvin quotes the critic, Luis Felipe Fabre, as saying that Polanco “opposes a poetry of silence—an aseptic, apolitical, 'pure' poetry—with the noise of the world, the sound of the background, a brutal and ungraspable landscape quickly glimpsed through the small window of a train in motion.” [17] In Cowboy & Other Poems, the author's “train” is moving very rapidly, for sure, toward, it would seem, a future not well envisioned but, also, not wholly devoid of “epistemic virtue.” If poets are the bearers of ethics as well as truth, we can understand Polanco to be a messenger of the existential crises of the 21^st Century, indeed, of the Anthropocene, itself. The moral question is whether we have the will to save ourselves from dystopian scenarios, and, if so, how? Cowboy & Other Poems is a good place to begin to consider the gravity of the human condition. Galvin's sensitive and durable translation highlights a young poet who deserves an international audience.

My essay/review of Alejandra Pizarnik's Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures, in PANK

https://pankmagazine.com/2019/11/26/review-last-innocencethe-lost-adventures-alejandra-pizarnik-trans-cecilia-rossi/

I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio (Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in Otoliths Oct '19)

I Remember Nightfall

Marosa di Giorgio

Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas

2018

Ugly Duckling Presse

318 pp

$22 (paper)

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in Otoliths [AU, October 2019]

"As a rule a father prefers his daughter and a mother her son; the child reacts to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father's place, and if she is a daughter, her mother's." Sigmund Freud

“The temporal is only a symbol.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Publication of I Remember Nightfall is part of a relatively recent “recovery project” highlighting unrecognized, or forgotten, female artists—including, the American “beat” poet, Elise Cowan (Ahsahta Press) and the Brazilian poet, Ana Cristina César (Parlor Press). Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), Uruguayan lawyer, actress, and poet, was raised by her hard-working Italian immigrant family on a farm in rural Salto, a “readymade” world of flora and fauna—including, human fauna—for her vivid imagination and mental, if not physical, escape from loneliness, even, trauma. “Marosa” means “lover of freedom,” an apt description for her fluid transformations and configurations of words, images, Nature, music, and occasional soft rhyming. Jeannine Marie Pitas' stunning translations of di Giorgio's lyrical, narrative prose verses demonstrate a childlike wonderland inhabited by familiar, altered, and devised people, situations, memories, as well as, other animate and inanimate events, phenomena, and things—a conjured fantastical environment. The feminist prose poet, Holly Iglesias, has theorized that the prose poem symbolizes the “boxes” in which women have traditionally been confined—kitchens, bedrooms, nurseries, playrooms, convents—like di Giorgio, farms.

The bilingual I Remember Nightfall comprises four separate texts packaged as a single volume and paginated consecutively—a wise editorial decision since, in effect, the compositions may be viewed as a long-form poem that should not be read as discrete sections but as fluid elements, in some instances, interchangeable, using the same symbolism throughout, a feature that, in addition to, the poetic form, unifies the text—though the Uruguayan scholar, Carmen Boullosa, has commented that di Giorgio, “always wrote the same book.” Indeed, the author is reported to have characterized her complete oeuvre as a single project, and the reader might interpret the prose poem form as a malleable element for “collage” writing with the capacity for combinatorial play. Such a linguistic trait might be received as symbolic of a fragmented reality in the Postmodern sense—representing social and political chaos such as that experienced by di Giorgio in Uruguay, including a period of urban guerilla warfare and military dictatorship. War is referred to several times in the text; however, it may be a mistake to perceive di Giorgio as a “political” poet since, according to the Uruguayan scholar, María Carolina Blixen, the poet was primarily consumed by her writing throughout life.

Di Giorgio's poetic style has been labeled, variously, as “expressionism,” “magical realism,” “surrealism,” and “neo-gothic.” One might, also, argue that many of these verses are examples of “grotesque” literature in which empathy resides with cruelty—represented by other notable female writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch. As several writers have pointed out, the “voice” of di Giorgio's poems is childlike, and, in her verses, the narrator is referred to as being, eight or nine years old [“I was only a little girl with a crown of braids.”, 259], “sixteen” [279], and “not yet twenty” [257]. This girl's persona should be read as Marosa herself, clearly indicated repetitively in the text [“Marosa,” “María,” “Rosa María,” “Marge,” “Virgin (María)” and, speculatively, “Mario,” “Maríano.”] Di Giorgio's persona is, as well, symbolized by iconography, possibly, alter egos or imaginary intimates—plants [roses, carnations, magnolias, violets, squash], animals [rodents, hares, birds, butterflies, bats]—each of these living entities having its own symbolic meaning in myth and literature, indicating multiple facets of personality, situation, locality, and space—differentiated and complex.

And my heart remained like winter oranges, curdled and frozen; I /

became delirious; they put me in the big bed and watched over me. /

At times, I got up, paced through the rooms, fell back into bed. And I /

always dreamed of that Rose, now a giant, who drank all the herbs, the /

mushrooms, the hens, and above all, who had some other scheme fixed /

in his mind...until at last the harvest was measured; the carts went out to /

the village, filled with jewels, those gems thrown out by the plants. And /

the old man left. /

Through my fever I heard my mother tell me: “The old man Rose /

has gone.” (155)

*

Her father came, having crossed all the land, all the fields; he knelt /

down and nearly kissed her. She could still run away, once and for all; /

the boundaries were clear, and beyond them lay other fields and other /

kings, who perhaps would take her in sweetly, shelter her for life. But she /

was sure of one thing: she was never going to take a single step beyond /

the family property. Her father embraced her; he remembered the night /

when he had conceived her, the tiny, the cry from the gut as she began /

to be born; he looked at the stars that had sent the order; he kissed her /

almost as if she were his bride, on her lips, on her breast that was naked /

like a mushroom, and he killed her. (257)

Di Giorgio's poetry encompasses myth, fable, and unconscious processes; although, despite Pitas' report that the author was not prone to revision, the verses seem intentionally composed, not a product of automaticity [an ideal of the Surrealists]. Similarly, many of the poems are “indeterminate,” incomplete, and di Giorgio often leaves us hanging. This characteristic, also, seems, to me, a purposeful conceit. I do not “read” di Giorgio as a naif despite the childlike posture she adopts in her poems. The writer is aware of life's possibilities and contradictions—both pain and beauty, love and violence, acceptance and rage.

She displays a genuine fondness for her maternal grandparents [section two, Magnolia, is dedicated to her grandmother], but she has an ambivalent relationship to her mother who is foreboding and powerful:

Then, my mother appeared with her box of letters; /

I could see her slim form, her well-hidden shoulders. I had to close /

my eyes and dig my nails into the grass in order to contain myself, but /

I followed her cautiously until she crossed the threshold and sat down /

on the bed and started to sort through some recently arrived postcards; /

then, I attacked her; I scratched at her clothes; her breasts popped out, /

big, fat, smooth, with pink tips, like two gorgeous fungi, two singular /

mushrooms...[S]he recognized me, she stared at me straight in the /

eyes, but I tore at her violently, and then almost immediately, she died.

But, I Remember Nightfall is not only about a girl's unhealthy, love-hate bond with her mother. Moreso, we are in the depths of a familial triangle—child, mother, father, and the book's conceptual framework is a classic, Freudian “Electra Complex” [see epigraph] involving Marosa's love for “Papa” [51] and the ultimate trauma—the betrayal of that love and trust by his emotional and physical violations [257]. In several places throughout the text, the child-woman portrays herself as a victim of men, a possible source of her conflicted rage directed toward her mother's failure to protect her. Perhaps the female iconography mentioned above represents a “doubling” [“mirroring” in Lacanian psychoanalysis] of Marosa and her mother, a possibility that the poet may have been aware of—possibly, as a result of some intimate knowledge with psychoanalytical treatment so pervasive among the privileged classes in Uruguay, as reported by the Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Ricardo Bernardi. On the other hand, Marosa's primal instincts may, simply, be releasing her covert psychological motivations.

Clearly, it is a straightforward exercise to interpret di Giorgio's work in terms of Freudian theory, investigating the interaction of conscious, subconscious [e.g., dreams], and unconscious processes. In psychoanalysis, the patient undergoes “talking therapy” [“free-association” and dream interpretation] to access latent mental content negatively influencing current behavior, including, language [e.g., “Freudian” slips] and other creative, generative acts. If we follow Freud's paradigm to consider erotic and morbid features of thoughts and actions, we can identify these elements in di Giorgio's writing that include overtly sexual allusions, e.g., “corrola” representing female genitalia; “mushrooms” representing “phallus” or nipples; autoeroticism; orgasm; homoeroticism, as well as, numerous examples of her ambiguous, conflicted relation to sex, including, her knowledge that sex is considered a sin in her Catholic tradition [though she, or her persona, pursues it, anyway].

Though di Giorgio''s poetry lends itself to interpretations of hallucination and pathology [“crazy” occurs several times in I Remember Nightfall], Pitas and Blixen have communicated to me via e-mail that there is no evidence that the author underwent analysis. In fact, according to Pitas, her family vigorously denies it. On the other hand, even if these demurrals are accurate, an article by the Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Denise Defey, reports that Uruguay has high rates of depression and suicide and there has been a tradition of untrained analysts and networks of informal therapy groups in the country; thus, it cannot be excluded that di Giorgio had intimate knowledge of and with “talking” therapies in one way or another. The translator, Jessica Sequeira provided two articles, one describing di Giorgio as “the madwoman of Uruguayan letters,” the other as, “la rara.” Via e-mail, Blixen stated that di Giorgio was called, by some, “;rara' o 'extravagante'” On the other hand, in a book chapter, Teresa Porzecanski depicts di Giorgio as a retiring, rather parochial, old maid; however, since di Giorgio traveled extensively abroad and received at least one international prize, she may have been more sophisticated and worldly than she appeared to many. We know that the poet was perceived as strange, eccentric, and flamboyant, but, whatever the facts may be, many details of her biography are lacking or unclear, requiring systematic research by scholars and critics.

The psychological and linguistic are not the only levels at which a reader can consider the complexity of di Giorgio's collection. Her themes resonate with her documented knowledge of myths, perhaps, the stories of Demeter [agriculture and fertility] and Persephone [underworld]. Further, considering the poet's use of Christian symbolism mentioned above, religious motivation should not be taken literally since Uruguay is said to be the most secular of Latin American countries. Indeed, none of the writing in I Remember Nightfall should be taken at “face value,” particularly, since the author clouds so much in mystery. Di Giorgio was, also, no doubt, familiar with European fairy tales with their idealized and romanticized themes of good and evil—“surrealist dreamscapes” lending themselves to Freudian dream analysis. Consider, for example, the German fairy tale, “Snow White and Rose Red,”—“Rosy-Red / Will you beat your lover dead?” Again, the grotesque is apparent in this tale as well as in di Giorgio's compositions [“We devoured her and it was like she was alive. / The ring I now wear was once hers.”: 49].

Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a French poet born in Uruguay whose writing di Giorgio must have been familiar with. Lautréamont's only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on 20^th Century arts and letters in Europe, particularly on the Surrealists who championed interpretation of unconscious motivation, especially, dreams, and who strove to practice “automatic writing.” According to Bernardi, and other direct and online sources available to me, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan are major figures in psychoanalytic traditions and practice in Uruguay—Klein's program advanced ideas about how the child's “existential anxiety” manifests in the unconscious [71: “...he / searched the wardrobe, drawer by drawer; he looked into the album; he / asked which one was Celia. We showed him my little sister. / He chose her.”], and Lacan's project addressed the notion of “desire” to be recognized by the “other” [253: “There / were only two dwellings in that vast region. 'Ours' and 'the other.' Our / family and 'the other;' that was how we referred to each other.”]. The scholar, Bruce Dean Willis, has pointed out that a theme of South American poetry is “recognizing one's self in one's other.”

In conclusion, di Giorgio's writing expands our understanding of Latin American literature at a time when women in the arts are receiving well-earned, though delayed, recognition. Consistent with this project, it is important to determine the extent to which she was engaged with feminism—intellectually and/or actively. Who, for example, were her friends? Did she live a “liberated,” “bohemian” lifestyle like many other female artists of her generation? The poet, Cristina Peri Rossi, has stated that “feminism began very early in Uruguay,” women enjoyed working—preferring to be single mothers, and they “detested” marriage and domesticity. Was di Giorgio a woman who broke traditional rules? Did she participate in the sexual freedom associated with a “unisex culture,” as Rossi describes the 1960s and 1970s in Uruguay among artists and intellectuals? The feminist scholar, Soledad Montañez, analyzing di Giorgio's “erotic prose,” claims that the poet “constructs gender narratives in order to undermine the patriarchal system from within.” At this point, many issues regarding di Giorgio—her work and her life—must remain indeterminate—like so many of her poems. Perhaps, she has written her verses and her biography to be intentionally ambiguous with regard to meaning and interpretation. Whatever the case, I highly recommend I Remember Nightfall to any reader who appreciates noteworthy innovative writing. Marosa di Giorgio deserves a wide audience and international recognition.

Review of Registration Caspar by J. Gordon Faylor (by Clara B. Jones)

Registration Caspar*

J. Gordon Faylor

Ugly Duckling Presse

2016

$15.00

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

“...or were they rather the one imagining things big bag village that I'd place Caspar, as if they went along courting local parents, fat diaries, birds, celebratorily unleashed dogs, the farm to table staff service tracing Leah's house in their panting endurance, thinking they were remote to this incisional social horror about them, only to learn they were already its ostensible illusory fixtures?” Registration Caspar, p 28

Experimental or avant garde writing is a heterogeneous sub-genre of American literature. Generally, these classifications are identified by their approaches to innovation, form, language, technique, composition, and/or method. Among the notable figures of these sub-genres are writers who are found outside the boundaries of mainstream publishing (via Matias Veigner), though some authors have entered the canon (e.g., Gertrude Stein, Alice Notley, John Ashbery). The critic Paul Stephens suggests that “experimentalism” shares “a rejection of a romantic lyric ego, either as a model of artistic creation or critical judgment. Experimentalism has consistently been viewed as a brake upon an unexamined or solipsistic subjectivity.” Stephens goes on to say that “'experimentalism' derives as much meaning from its social and institutional contexts as it does from its transhistorical basis in the analogy to scientific method” and “experimental literature was often knowingly written for limited audiences—not out of snobbery, but out of esthetic and political principle.” Related to Stephens' views, the critic Natalia Cecire quotes poet-critic Lyn Hejinian as stating that “an experimental tradition in American poetry [has] sources in Pound's imagism and Stein's realism.” The present review of J. Gordon Faylor's [Editor, GAUSS PDF] new book, Registration Caspar, is an attempt to convince the reader that it is an extreme and extremely compelling tour de force of experimental literature in the tradition of associative writing and, possibly, epic [“long form”] poetry.

Registration Caspar exemplifies serious writing exhibiting a significant degree of linguistic play characteristic of many experimental works. Ugly Duckling Presse's media statement about the book provides an entry into the novel with the following information: “Caspar, a non-gendered entity, only has five hours left before it is executed by its employer. Though it remains to be seen if this execution is biological and programmatic in nature, it's clear that money needs to be made for the two partners Caspar leaves behind.” One concludes from this description that the book is a dream or fantasy or delusion or “new world” in the tradition of psychological realism [Conceptual Psychology] since prisoners convicted of capital crime are not [in a “real” world] released to tie up unfinished business before they are executed or, better, erased [sic], from society. Further, in actuality, a subject cannot go back in time; thus, regrets are irrelevant when faced with erasure. “What is, is.” in the words of Joe Guidice, an imprisoned star of the series, Real Housewives of New Jersey®. The publisher's “blurb” provides the reader with the novel's architecture, hinting at the ending before we engage with the text's complex narrative elements and identifying the writing as metafiction—fiction about fiction. Further, Caspar is described as an “entity,” instructing the reader not to assume that he/she/they/it is a character in the conventional sense though he is, somehow, registered, classified, and, thus, duly noted.

Faylor's book can be placed in a Postmodern tradition whereby meaning is surrendered to the reader him-/her-self [them-selves]. Some concrete elements are clear from the publisher's statement characterizing the novel as “form-play.” Indeed, like many examples of experimental writing, Registration Caspar is accessible and humorous, in great part because the author invites the reader to participate in the act[s] of creativity. It would be a mistake, however, for the reader to attempt to decode Faylor's meaning, a process that would be necessarily presumptuous and, ultimately, disrespectful to the author, as well as, a form of appropriation [of the author's aesthetics, perceptions, and ideas]. On the other hand, if the book is all play, it is nihilistic. As some critics have said, however, art requires a moral stance, and, following the summary provided by Ugly Duckling Presse, we might assume that Faylor's book is a form of surrealism or futurism, minimalistic because of the “story's” truncation of the temporal dimension [five hours until erasure]. The interpretation of Registration Caspar that I advance in this review represents my subjective experience as a reader of the novel. I do not claim to understand Faylor's serious or playful intentions; however, I am of the opinion that the book is both serious and playful as a work of art. Related to this, I did not form the opinion that the author was attempting to manipulate me, the reader, or to exhibit his superior skills and intelligence. Like the best literature, Registration Caspar left me feeling that my world-view has been expanded and that my investment of time was productive.

Some experimental works are codified, and I think Registration Caspar is no exception. In my opinion, Faylor permits his readers to play with words and their potential significance[s] through the interchange, addition, and/or deletion of vowels and consonants [see Wikipedia® entries for possible interpretations]. Nowhere is this more evident than in the protagonist's [main entity's or Registrant's] name, “Caspar,” which might be transformed into Caesar [an overseer of the transformation of a republic to an empire (oligarchy as in present-day America)] or Castor [mythology; a constellation; a New York art gallery] or Cortázar [a writer associated with Kaiser (sic) Wilhelm II; a contemporary fashion designer] or paradigm or parametric or Casca [a messenger in Shakespear's play, Julius Caesar] or Paracelsus [diease/disorder as psychological phenomenon]. In addition to other re-iterations [“scried”/screed; “Caspar”/”Cezary”/Caesar/Kaiser; “y”/yes; “x”/unknown entity (sic); “n”/unknown number], numerous neologisms occur throughout the text [Chrysalidocarpus; snowwphhpiles; yato], perhaps, signifying the unknown or unknowable or the inadequacies and limitations of language. I read these various conventions as reminders not to try too hard to decode Faylor's intentions or meaning[s]—not to treat the novel as a puzzle to the exclusion of other purposes or non-purposes, a major contradiction embedded in the text.

The novel is a puzzle, however, though I think to view it solely in that manner would be to miss a profound conceptual framework. The unknown and unknowable are about our future which the rapid pace of the “story” indicates is a fate we are racing toward. Seemingly random placements of references to time and to money suggest that Capitalism and materialism have doomed us to a meaningless, unknown, dark end [erasure]—to be or to become, like Caspar, voided as individuals. But, here lies another contradiction: the word, “execution,” can be defined as “to die” and, also, “to act.” Thus, the book's vaguely-defined “entity,” Caspar, may not be without agency [or, hope?], assuming that the seemingly inevitable “execution” or erasure is unknowable and not determined. However, I may be over-thinking the novel, particularly, since its paragraphs and chapters can stand alone—apart from any interpretation that might be advanced for the whole text. Ultimately, whatever Faylor's world-view may be, Registration Caspar should be received as an example of carefully crafted associative writing deserving to be read by all consumers of exceptional, exciting, and serious innovative art.

*Originally appearing in Yellow Chair Review, 2016