She Walked in Beauty Like the Night (or at Least I’m Pretty Sure)
There was a time when her face made me panic. And when it did that was highly unlike me; for back then, I was yet at the height of what I’d thought was my lasting good fortune with women. In short, I was a very big fish in a tiny pond that was polluted by drugs and whiskey. Now, though, things have drastically altered. It’s eight years later, and Cormac McCarthy has already used the title I’d like to use for my biography. Because let me assure you, reader: No Country for Old Men best describes being thirty when you live in a college town. And the college town in question? Well...
Read MoreReview: Trophy Wife, “Sing What Scares You”
Countless albums sit on history’s shelf, but exceedingly few create their own place in time. A place where we can revisit, enriched each time. While I will doubtless miss out on many albums that will carve their places after I am gone, I am fortunate to be alive today to visit the timeless place created by Trophy Wife‘s sophomore effort, Sing What Scares You. Have you ever felt as if language lacked the power and nuance to express a feeling as it sprouted inside you? Like the feeling of spotting a young girl at a charity auction reading a comic strip titled Bizarre Gender-Swapping...
Read MoreMaureen and Sylvia
Gary Garfield and Fuzzy Mariano were sitting in Fuzzy’s basement living room discussing what to do that summer Saturday morning — Fuzzy sprawled on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, and Gary in the Barcalounger, fully reclined, staring at the ceiling tiles. There were two weeks left in the summer of 1957 before they would be high school freshmen, no longer boys, almost men. Only two weeks, but it might as well have been a year and a day, because Gary and Fuzzy lived life as it came, and two weeks from today was the distant future. Fuzzy and Gary thought about girls, cars, and...
Read MoreSuperior Dairy
My stomach churned as I dressed to take Dad on our first lunch date in decades. For our outing today, he had groomed as carefully as a suitor. He’d taken his weekly shower, shaved, and put on a clean chambray shirt. His collar yawned around his neck, and the skin below his cuffs was papery as corn husks. Bracing his elbow so he wouldn’t stumble on the buckled sidewalk, I heaved open the thick glass door, and my father stuttered into Superior Dairy on his wooden cane. The place wasn’t really preserved as a 1950s-style diner — they simply had never remodeled. The booths and bar stools...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of February 4 (Snow)
In the Northern Hemisphere, it is the midst of winter. For some locations, this may mean tons of snow, while in others, there may be only a dusting. This week, Wild Violet’s contributors use snow imagery in conveying their message. In Robert Lavett Smith’s poem, “Daffodils,” regrets become as oddly out of place as daffodils in snow. In Darren C. Demaree’s poem, “A Bare Fist of Snow,” a few words encapsulate a cold but snowless winter. In Raghbir Dhillon’s essay, “My First Snow,” he recalls how a first experience...
Read MoreMy First Snow
When I saw snow falling from the sky, for the first time in my life, I was thirty-two years old and was studying in Purdue University. I had lived in the flatlands of Punjab, India, where it never snowed. While growing up, I read about snow in books and wondered how it felt to have flakes of snow falling on your head. We do have snow on the Himalayan Mountains, but they’re far away from where I grew up. When I was twenty and working as an engineer in New Delhi, my friend, Mohan, was posted in Simla Hills, where they had frequent snow falls.This hill station, which served as the summer...
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