Featured Works: Week of Oct 19 (Contemplation)
Amid the global uncertainty of the past several months, we have at times become overwhelmed. For many of us, it has also been a time of reflection and contemplation, as demonstrated by this week’s contributors. “On Gary Hume’s ‘The Whole World’” by Brian Cromwall delves into the all-encompassing qualities of our brains. “Those Unheard are Sweeter” by Thomas DeConna explores the inner world of a man whose deep thoughts are mistaken for shyness. “Somewhere in the Night” by John Hawkins takes a nocturnal bus trip that explores the narrator’s place in the...
Read MoreSomewhere in the Night
Middle Georgia—Summer 1974 He had forgotten how long he had been traveling—or how far. It had all seemed a lot clearer back then when he first decided to come to see her, again. All that was involved was flying into Atlanta and then taking the bus down to Flat Rock—just a few hours at most. But somehow, somewhere along the line, everything changed. Maybe it changed after he heard her voice; as if everything up until that time had been little more than a lark, an escape—not from boredom, but from the burden of routine repetition—or maybe it was just because of simple curiosity. He...
Read MoreThose Unheard Are Sweeter
“Where do you go?” The question echoes in my mind as if sounding through a cavern. It’s annoying as an alarm clock. If I could only swat a snooze button and silence the interruption. “Dear,” my wife says with fading patience, “the Millers drove all this way to meet us, and you’re ignoring them.” I snap out of it and recognize Bailey’s Tabard Inn, the restaurant that my wife, Barbara, and I frequent. At the table sits another couple, Alison and Geoffrey Miller. I work with Geoff at the university. In fact, we share an office because we’re literature professors. He...
Read MoreOn Gary Hume’s “The Whole World” (2011)
Usually I prefer the image to go off the edges of the panel, for it to be larger than the space I can capture it in. - Gary Hume The brain is a soaked cabbage, its iters ancient mazes beneath new gloss of orbits gentle in dark magenta space. Why are this world’s edges so close? Below, nothing else interrupts; we nearly fall off the old thought into color, a race of slaw slowly watching its own wrinkles age, age into forever’s...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Oct 12 (Grief)
As we near the end of October, we enter a season of remembrance, a holiday dedicated to honoring those who passed before us. This week’s contributors help to forge a path through grief. In “Reading My Father” by Anthony Botti, favorite books help conjure memories of a father. “Bearing Loss” by Frank De Canio uses the imagery of fall to explore seasons of change and loss. “Walter, Pierre, Tim, Howard” by Anthony Botti eulogizes four friends lost during the initial days of the AIDS epidemic. “You squint the way one eye still aches” by Simon Perchik...
Read MoreYou squint the way one eye still aches
You squint the way one eye still aches was shaped by rising water as it flattens out in the silence that wants you to make good without asking why or what for –it’s how moonlight works, half disguised as tears to soften the ground half as a sea that long ago left all these bottom stones uncovered as the mist where their breath used to be –somebody owes them all something though you come by to pay down one that still has its arms around you is pulling you closer to shore by wiping the foam from your lips –you darken the Earth to get a better look and with child-like...
Read More