An excerpt from “Let us draw near” by Kevin McIlvoy, published at Scoundrel Time:

Let us draw near

“No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” Virgil, The Aeneid,
National September 11 Memorial Museum

Ten days after 9/11 my father’s heart exploded, his life collapsing in a matter of moments. We could not find each other in our own familiar streets. We could not ask now how to meet him in the ash. Old-school Catholics, we prayed, “Adiemus. Adiemus.”

There were two of me, one loving, one late in loving. I set aside the national mourning, which I could not withstand. When you said he can rest now, asked how you could help, that brought no calm, and no peace came when you recalled your own lost ones.

No new perspective came when news returned again, again to the three thousand gone, to acts of heroism, to horrors visited upon survivors, to tender personal interviews news cycle after news cycle that I took in while ignoring, ignoring the entire wrecked nation.

Today my sister, youngest of the five children, has died before her turn. She has ended her participation in our grim middle-age sibling tag game of electronic messaging, burning each other with teasing grief, our way to touch but not be done with familial anniversaries of mistaking one obliterated story for another. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the essay, “The Cure For Racism Is Cancer,” by Tony Hoagland, published at The Sun:

The Cure For Racism Is Cancer

The woman sitting next to me in the waiting room is wearing a blue dashiki, a sterile paper face mask to protect her from infection, and a black leather Oakland Raiders baseball cap. I look down at her brown, sandaled feet and see that her toenails are the color of green papaya, glossy and enameled.

This room at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, is full of people of different ages, body types, skin colors, religious preferences, mother tongues, and cultural backgrounds. Standing along one wall, in work boots, denim overalls, and a hunter’s camouflage hat, is a white rancher in his forties. Nervously, he shifts from foot to foot, a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. An elderly Chinese couple sit side by side, silently studying their phones. The husband is watching a video. The wife is the sick one, pale and gaunt. Her head droops as if she is fighting sleep. An African American family occupies a corner. They are wearing church clothes; the older kids are supervising the younger ones while two grown women lean into their conversation and a man — fiftyish, in a gray sports coat — stares into space.

America, that old problem of yours? Racism? I have a cure for it: Get cancer. Come into these waiting rooms and clinics, the cold radiology units and the ICUcubicles. Take a walk down Leukemia Lane with a strange pain in your lower back and an uneasy sense of foreboding. Make an appointment for your CATscan. Wonder what you are doing here among all these sick people: the retired telephone lineman, the grandmother, the junior-high-school soccer coach, the mother of three.

[…continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem, “The Truly Screaming Baby,” by Heather McHugh, published at Scoundrel Time:

The Truly Screaming Baby

Thank God says the woman in 13E
we’re not back there she means
back there with the mom
with the truly screaming baby
and the two toddlers to boot (by God she’d never
boot these two) these other two who didn’t once
between them (sourly now my row-mate feels
it is important to inform me) listen to a word
she said.  The baby sounds to be
in agony.  We haven’t yet

entirely taxi’d out to take-off.
None of the passengers appears
remotely sympathetic and I can’t help
wincing on the mom’s behalf:  what if
the baby’s sick what if she’s always
like this and mother’s feeling
permanently miserable since given this
one hoped-for getaway she cannot get away
what is a flight if not an escapade and yet
her fellow passengers are blaming her
for what she can’t escape or even manage to
ameliorate what if they’re penniless and this

is her one chance to visit relatives who might
relieve if not relate what if the father’s
always off carousing and comes home
an hour or two to get her
pregnant once again then take
her just as much to task as these more
pampered people on the airplane do
what makes this baby’s life so utterly

[…continue reading here]

In anticipation of the publication of her new book, ˆFlorida, Lauren Groff sat for an interview with The New York Times:

Lauren Groff, author most recently of the story collection “Florida,” sees Mr. Rochester as a villain: “He’s a sociopath who keeps his grieving wife locked in the attic and tries to gaslight poor, plain, abused Jane Eyre then marry her bigamously.”

What books are on your nightstand?

I don’t know if I have a nightstand anymore. I do have an avalanche of books with a reading light sticking out of it. From across the room, I can see the autobiography of Lili’uokalani, the Hawaiian queen and songwriter who composed “Aloha ‘Oe,” Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend” and two novels by Marie-Claire Blais, a Québécoise writer who now lives in Key West: “La Belle Bête” and “Soifs.”

What’s the last great book you read?

I just read two great books at the same time: I reread Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion,” which is one of the strangest and angriest novels of the 20th century, and for the first time I read Morgan Parker’s “There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé,” a brilliant poetry collection playing so cunningly with pop culture that it reminded me that pop culture is astonishingly deep and fascinating and is only considered frivolous because it — like caretaking careers and the domestic sphere — is devalued for being considered primarily feminine. […continue reading here]