https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-12-12 19:41:002022-02-25 17:15:07“The Children” by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry ’09)
Ludlow Street will always be stuck in 1994, the year I moved from Buffalo to live in an Alphabet City summer sublet. I may also always be stuck in 1994, in complicated thrall to the Perland sisters.
When I made a reservation to stay at a glossy, high-rise hotel on Ludlow last year, I did so with the urge to collide my present-day self against my younger self. I wanted to slip into the old Ludlow’s grotty sepia, walk past paint-tagged storefront gates closed like brittle eyelids over vacant shops, jam a toehold into my chimerical youth. I also wanted to know what it would feel like to press up against Ludlow Street’s new skin: In short, I ate vegan ice cream scooped at one a.m., found the rooftops of Loisaida buildings to be free of charm, and walked along Houston, feeling both like a ghost and far more solid and grounded than I ever did as a callow twentysomething.
[…continue reading “Portrait of a Becoming” at Pigeon Pages.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-12-11 18:57:002022-02-25 17:15:03“Portrait of a Becoming” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19)
“You Don’t have to Be Tough All by Yourself, You Said” and “Zuihitsu with Love for the Moon’s Failed Rebellion” by Cynthia Dewi Oka (poetry ’19), published by Scoundrel Time.
You Don’t Have to Be Tough All by Yourself, You Said
and if I returned the favor, it was much later. Or I lied. At the airport, waiting for my turn to sleep. Like a leg bone inside a grasshopper. In the selfie I sent, darkness
curtains one side of my head which hasn’t thought of Christopher for years. Aside from his occasional Facebook posts captioned #blessed below boys in blue
jerseys #despite the Canucks’ losing streak. The Rockies look photoshopped, but not the beetlelike sacs under his mother’s eyes. All seasons, petals by a jacuzzi. Cherry-
flavored hospital jellos on the lid of the grill. Unless they’re margaritas, O, winking emoji #FUCKCANCERGOCHEMO! I should’ve sent his mother a letter. Something about that year
[…continue reading “You Don’t have to Be Tough All by Yourself, You Said” and find “Zuihitsu with Love for the Moon’s Failed Rebellion” at Scoundrel Time. You can also find Cynthia Dewi Oka’s writing on Aracelis Girmay’s “Arroz Poetica” at Poetry Daily as well as another poem, “Meditation on the Worth of Anything,” at Tupelo Quarterly.]
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A craft essay by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple (fiction ’19), published by Craft.
Suspense in Flannery O’Connor’s “The River”
Long before we discover that the main character, a little boy named Harry, will drown in the final moments of Flannery O’Connor’s “The River,” we are unsettled while reading the story. On the surface, the main actions before the drowning are not particularly threatening (Harry visits with a new babysitter, takes a trolley ride, and attends an informal religious service down by the river), but O’Connor makes specific choices that turn these ostensibly mundane activities into ones that seem rife with potential danger. Using setting, characterization, and pacing, O’Connor infuses even the smallest moments of Harry’s day with heightened suspense, building piece by piece to the cathartic but fatal final moments in the story.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-12-05 16:48:002022-02-25 17:14:59“Apella” by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry ’09)
“It has a god structure. I think it will resist a long time.”
—Customer review of the Uniqlo Beauty Light bra, $19.99
O keep me up, keep me going. Keep it together. Smooth me. Reduce excess movement. There is a heaviness. There is around me a God Structure. It helps me organize my thoughts. It has laid out plans, I think, for various eventualities, and the existence of plans,
though they change, is a comfort. This morning the God Structure led me to a vine that was drooping over the far edge of the front lawn, covered with ripe blackberries. God Structure said, Eat them, and I did. The stain of them still on my hands when I heard
that the God Structure had also made a disease that is suddenly taking from my friend his body, among other things. It seems the God Structure doesn’t give a shit, has no alternate plan. Keep Google-ing it, nothing appears. His tongue tries to choke him in his sleep. His God Structure is
written into his code: it was always there, in silence, inevitable.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-12-04 16:40:002022-02-25 17:14:58“The God Structure” by Chloe Martinez (poetry ’09)
Before I got baby chicks, I attended chicken class at Wardell’s Feed and Pet, a few miles down the highway. Eric, the chicken class teacher, sold me a brooder. If you don’t know, a brooder is a kind of substitute mother hen: it’s a box with a heat lamp and a feeder and waterer. The chicks live in it until they’re eight weeks old and ready to move outside to the coop. It’s obvious to me why a substitute mother is called a brooder. Motherhood for me is characterized by an ongoing sense of worry and inadequacy.
[…continue reading “On Chickens, Children, and Fascism” at The Missouri Review.]
But then four crows—no, maybe ravens—those large, black birds big as dogs, like gentlemen, crossed the path, looking up, contemplating something invisible,
feathers on their crowns at attention, as if waxed into style, sun polishing each upright stalk, asphalt, grass visible between each black spear, the way, when younger, we spiked
our hair before dancing all night at an after-hours club, but I don’t know what it means now: Rocking gait: slow procession: pondering a shared question—
unseen force drawing them across the road or a predator overhead or walking away from despair hidden in the heart. She looks
to be holding a miniature man in her lap, the Mary of Kells. He has two left feet. And she stares, her face a mask of sorrow, eyes flattened, looking ahead.
[…continue reading “The Book of Kells” at Poetry.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-12-02 16:29:002022-02-25 17:14:57“The Book of Kells” by Joy Manesiotis (poetry ’86)
Two poems by Amanda Newell (poetry ’17), published byCultural Weekly.
Permanent Girl
She’s fifty now tired of riding the blue anchor etched into his left bicep tired of being his USNA pinup girl always fighting gravity bubbled
tits & ass sagging on the freckled folds of his skin. The things she’s seen! The pool halls! Sundays at Charles Town the Hollywood Casino his favorite.
[…continue reading “Permanent Girl” as well as a second poem, “Black Angus,” at Cultural Weekly.]
One of the first things I noticed about the book is the cover, which features the art of Titus Kaphar. You and Kaphar collaborated on “Redaction: A Project,” an exhibition at MoMA that draws on source material from lawsuits filed on behalf of people incarcerated because of an inability to pay court fines and fees. You have four poems in Felon that are erasures/redactions with specific titles (“In Alabama,” In Houston,” et cetera). They’re all mappable, yet the erasures show the systematic obliteration of black life. Could you speak about this?
BETTS
I’m trying to find ways to connect my identity as a lawyer with my identity as a poet. I’m on the board of the Civil Rights Corps, which deals with money bail. They are specifically trying to challenge the fact that many states incarcerate people and leave them incarcerated just because they can’t pay their bail or because they owe fines for traffic tickets or things like that, citations.
But nobody can understand these court documents. I mean, you get sixty to seventy pages. It’s like reading a novella, and you don’t want to really read a novella that’s talking about things like jurisdiction. But what I thought about was this poetry-ness, and if we can find the poetry. Instead of thinking that redaction is a tool to get rid of and hide what is most sensitive, what if we thought about it as a tool to remove the superfluous? What if I tried to find the rhythm, the poetry, the character, the story, the person? If I allowed the document to actually be a voice of the person writing it? That’s what I attempted to do.
For me, this says a couple of things. It represents the attempt of the state to physically remove you, but then it also represents the attempt of people to reassert their existence. Those two things get to exist as one. In the same way that these two things are happening, there’s this fight against erasure. I think that’s what the poems end up mimicking. Even though the portraits on the cover represent that erasure, they also represent the existence of something underneath. It’s pushing back against that.
