Volume 111, Number 3/4
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…I need to speak about home I need to speak about living room where the land is not bullied and beaten into a tombstone I need to speak about living room where the talk will take place in my language —June Jordan Cover Caption: [from] “The Shadow City” series, 2007-2012, Kibera, Nairobi © Christian Als/Panos |
Editors’ Page
Is there a word more universal and more profoundly private than “home”? What it conjures up for each of us is distinct and inviolable: not a place, exactly, but a time in a place or places that were, that are, our own. Haven, testing ground, war-zone—for better or for worse, our most intimate memories are shaped there.
In an era of entrenched poverty and mass displacement, the image of home has particular poignancy. In refugee camps and vast slums around the world, millions inhabit so-called “temporary” shelters. Like the Kenyan family in our cover photo, they gather by makeshift hearths to prepare the evening meal.
An essay in this issue, “Home Thoughts” by poet and psychoanalyst Henry M. Seiden, argues that the longing for home is a central theme in poetry and in therapy. Much of the work in these pages animates his claim. Chris Green’s opening poem unfolds in a precarious household “next to the railroad tracks” and ends, “My father was news from the outside. / I could not stop him from coming home.” Casey Nagle’s “Chevy Lumina Camera Obscura,” extols the enchantments of a childhood hideout: “We loved the upside-down projections: / the sunset, the panic, the neighborhood search….//…we sat behind the wheel, waving goodbye, / happily, as if we were moving.”
Leaving home to reinvent oneself is the subject of Mary Stone Hanley’s profile of her brother, poet Yusef Rahman of the Black Arts Movement. She recounts scenes from their family life in Cleveland and speculates about his transformation in New York City, his subsequent homelessness in LA, his murder in Sacramento. And Margaret Randall’s review of Lauren Camp’s One Hundred Hungers lauds a daughter’s ardent attempt to reconnect her Iraqi-American father to the home of his birth.
But isn’t the body our ultimate home? Where else can we always be found? In the words of Jenny Browne, whose poems are introduced in this issue by Naomi Shihab Nye, “Knock-knock. // I’ll swear / I’m there.”
Poetry
Chris Green
The Poem as Dog
Suzanne O’Connell
Sepia Tones
My Captive
Frankie Drayus
Trapped caught held
Matthew Thorburn
Holy Ghost
The Size of a Fist
Hayden Saunier
Performing Heart-Repair Surgery at 2 A.M. While Asleep
Riverside Attractions / Terminal Avenue
Christopher Beard
Catching Old Movies at Theater Arcadia
Afaa Michael Weaver
Something It’s Taken Thirty Years to Write
Peter Neil Carroll
JFK
Julian Bond
What Does It Mean?
Lindsey Royce
Polished
Joseph Zaccardi
Talk in the Town Barbershop
Katherine Lo
Barbershop
Betsy Sholl
Missing Sister
Jacqueline Balderrama
You and I See the Animals
Casey Nagle
Chevy Lumina Camera Obscura
Javy Awan
Ticket Outta Here
Lucinda Watson
Road Trip
Cynthia White
Toward a Natural History of My Mother
Roger Pfingston
Pie Pan
Denise Duhamel
Darwinian Pantoum
Colette Inez
At the Met
Anya Silver
Grackles
Marie Reynolds
Ars Poetica: Starting Over
Lee Rossi
Knucks
Richard Jones
Waiting for the Bus
Black-and-White Photograph
Phillip Sterling
Words Frequently Confused: Transformation, Transmutation
Sue Song
Last Night
Last Rites
James Crews
The Question
Halfway-Heaven
Paul Martin
The Peach
Cynthia White
My Father’s Guns
Judith Harris
My Father Comes to My Hospital Room
My Father in Red Sweater
Adam Scheffler
A Nursing Home in Kentucky
Rob Hunter
The Dementia Patients
Myronn Hardy
The Super Looks from Balcony
Rasaq Malik
What My Father Says Every Night
Indran Amirthanayagam
Acceptance Speech
Dara Barnat
The Age I Am to Myself
What Spanish Moss Knows
Teresa Mei Chuc
Chernobyl Necklace
R.T. Smith
Pandora
Brooke Sahni
Petrichor
Jack Vian
(Flight)
Nora Hutton Shepard
No Reason
Sudie Nostrand
[In large cities]
John Bargowski
Star Party
Brad Johnson
Galileo Looking Up
Fred Shaw
“You Can’t Be in Heaven and on Earth at the Same Time”
Rodney Torrenson
In St. Louis, My Son, Daughter and I Stroll the Old Delmar Loop
Karen Sagstetter
Now that you’re in a better mood
Betsy Johnson-Miller
let’s try this again: what is romantic
Stephen Tapscott
Why do I address you as you
Helena Mesa
Offering
The Players
Jackleen Holton Hookway
Literature
Meditation on a Baby Wipe
Emily Tuszynska
Every Day a River
Hillary Brooks Houle
I Still See You
José Angel Araguz
Music Box
Naomi Shihab Nye
Ring
Lonesome on the Earth
Poets Introducing Poets
Naomi Shihab Nye introduces Jenny Browne
The Pretty Lizard Breaks
Worst Desert Ever
In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing
A Rainy Day on the Rue de Something
Thoughts on the Past in Guadalupe County
Open Carry
Llano Park
Re-reading The Tempest
Mountains Behind Mountains
Change
Essays
Henry M. Seiden “Home Thoughts”
Mary Stone Hanley “A Profile in Jazz and Poetry: The Lost Music of Yusef Rahman”
Joanna Chen “A Beginner’s Guide to Tear Gas”
Reviews
Margaret Randall “The Tenacity of Memory”
One Hundred Hungers: Poems
by Lauren Camp
Batnadiv HaKarmi “Holes in the Earth”
Red Deer
by Anne Marie Macari
Teri Cross Davis “Restless Vulnerability”
Honest Engine
by Kyle Dargan