the Windsor Review Fall 2020 53.1 the Windsor Review Fall 2020 Volume 53 Number 1 Established in 1965, the Windsor Review is dedicated to publishing new and emerging writers from North America and beyond. Editor: Dale Jacobs Fiction Editor: Hollie Adams Poetry Editor: Daniel Lockhart Review Editor: André Narbonne Cover Image: Dale Jacobs With thanks to: • Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Windsor • Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Windsor • Mita Williams, Devon Mordell, and Heidi Jacobs at University of Windsor’s Leddy Library for assistance with layout, design & digital hosting • Stacie Teasdale for layout and design Contact us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @WindsorReview The Windsor Review is an Open Access literary journal published twice a year at uwindsor.ca/thewindsorreview ISSN: 2562-8992 Works in The Windsor Review are published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Creative Commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Table of Contents A Word from the Editor 1 Dale Jacobs The Path They Cut Across the Night (poetry) 2 Chelsea Coupal Finally seeing the Pleiades in Tishomingo (poetry) 3 Craig Finlay Rage, Rage against the Crow in the Park (poetry) 4 Yuan Changming Open House (fiction) 5 Franz Jørgen Neumann Sarlacc’s Pit, or: The cave of the giant’s mouth (poetry) 10 Michael Mirolla Wolfsbane (poetry) 11 John Riebetanz Ninsun considers the difference between entire and whole (poetry) 13 Mary Buchinger Dirty Tile Floor (fiction) 14 Theresa Moritz What We Make of Symbols (poetry) 18 Sabyasachi Nag let·ter (poetry) 19 Roxana L. Cazan Sweet Water Only (poetry) 20 Alamgir Hashmi Insulators (poetry) 21 Tom Cull The Juries that Can’t Shoot Straight: Why don’t the G.G, Scotiabank Giller, and Rogers Writers’ Trust Awards for Fiction Pick the Same Book? (review essay)23 André Narbonne Contributors 29 1 A Word from the Editor Dale Jacobs he Windsor Review entered a new chapter last fall with the launch of a new website and the Tpublication of the retrospective issue, edited by current Reviews editor, André Narbonne. That issue—the first to be fully open access—highlighted the journal’s storied past and the impressive legacy that we have inherited as we publish the first issue of the re-launch of The Windsor Review. This issue looks to the future as we feature an impressive array of poets and fiction writers from diverse locations and backgrounds. We begin the issue watching the stars, both as they fall and as they appear in constellations in the night sky. Throughout the rest of the issue, we are asked to grapple with family secrets, tensions, and histories. We are given new ways to examine mythologies and the natural world. And we are asked to contemplate the experiences of refugees and the border spaces they must cross. I think you will find, as I have, exciting new voices and perspectives. I want to thank Hollie Adams, our Fiction editor, and Daniel Lockhart, our Poetry editor, for helping to shape such an excellent issue with their selections. We end the issue with André Narbonne’s cogent essay on fiction and the state of literary prizes in Canada for our new Review section. As we move forward, this section will focus on a different genre each issue, moving between fiction, poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction. Welcome to the first issue of the re-launch of The Windsor Review. I hope you enjoy the issue and that, if you are a writer yourself, you will consider submitting to a future issue. Fall 2020 53.1 2 The Path They Cut Across the Night Chelsea Coupal We watch stars fall – they dash across the dark like headlights on a black road. We stand on my back deck on the town’s outskirts. A star streams across and we ask: Did you see that? Both wondering if we did or made it up. He’s nineteen; I’m sixteen. At the time, that difference feels like a dugout wide enough to swim across. An August I’ve never seen: icy-clear, frost almost landing on our tongues and the garden’s gladiolus. The farmers are up still – studying temperatures, driving out to fields. It’s midnight and the farmers are up still. Crouched in fields to study crops sown in late spring. They examine plants in the glow: headlights and moonlight. An August they’ve never seen. It’s midnight; we watch stars fall. Try to recall the arch of the last one, the path it cut across the night. We impatiently wait – wishing we could name constellations – for the next one. Then one more. On the town’s outskirts, our own breath fogs up the dark. A small, low cloud that glows. We know we won’t do this with everyone. The shower happens only once a year and never like this – in cold as hard as Catholic gravestones, the ones lined up on the other side of town. We make up names for constellations. On my back deck, we watch starts fall. Impatiently wait. Our breath glows against the dark. Did you see that? The Windsor Review 3 Finally seeing the Pleiades in Tishomingo Craig Finlay In Las Vegas the spire of light atop the Luxor Casino Pyramid has created its own ecosystem. First insects, then bats to feast upon them. A tiny sun, drawing into itself an orbit of life from the blackness. How angry, I thought, starlight must be. How angry when, exhausted and stumbling to the finish, it finds itself upstaged by a thousand-watt halogen at a Chrysler dealership. The Pleiades can only be seen reasonably far from most people. They’re faint. Once I was too nervous to kiss a girl when we saw them in a darker sky than Tishomingo’s. I was confused at the time, because in the hay fields of Kievan Rus farmers knew the Pleiades were seven maids sent to dance the round dances, to sing. Then I saw them last night and today I learned that in Cherokee tradition they were six brothers who rose into the sky because they wanted to play, they did not want to work. The seventh brother fell into the ground and a pine tree grew where he fell. Fall 2020 53.1 4 Rage, Rage against the Crow in the Park Yuan Changming Disguised as a pigeon, you’ve just had Enough food From my palm (& heart); then, you flap high up Beginning to circle above me, ready To flee away, but only after Shitting on my head & heart (again) The Windsor Review 5 Open House Franz Jørgen Neumann ernando peeled a blue sliver of overlooked painter’s tape from the mantlepiece, then turned Fto his two older sisters. I have some news, he thought. Jen and Harper were at their mother’s bay window, watching the men unload furniture from the box truck: end tables, silver lamps without shades, a mirror fit for a giant—all placed around the FOR SALE sign. Staging the house with furniture was meant to raise the home’s asking price back to where it had been before the downturn. Trust me, the realtor had said. People have terrible imaginations. They need props. “It’s gonna feel like a completely different house,” Jen said. “Did this room ever feel like ours?” Fernando said. “It felt off limits,” Harper said. “Mom’s students, waiting on our couch, farting it up.” “The Occupiers,” Fernando said, watching as two of the home stagers lowered a white couch from the back of the truck. Jen laughed. “I forgot you called them that.” The couch was set down in the street, then lifted again. “They’re going to fit that in here?” Jen said. Fernando opened the front door as the men carried the couch haltingly up the walk. They paused to adjust their grip, the man in front changing his position so he faced the house, revealing Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the front of his T-shirt, but with the angst-ridden subject wearing a pair of headphones and shades. “Beep beep,” said a third stager, better dressed than his companions. He overtook the men with the couch and trotted into the house with a long sagging bundle. Unrolled, it revealed itself to be a gray shag rug that concealed the divots the old grand piano had worn into the floorboards. The couch came through next, resting a good three feet away from the wall, like in magazine homes. The floor joists creaked from having to once again support a great weight. “I wish you guys would redo my place,” Jen said to the men. Fernando found it disconcerting to see the house make room for furniture again. Long before their mother had moved into the memory care centre—perhaps a year after she’d stopped teaching piano—she had begun expunging the house of nearly everything: furniture, the TVs, even the piano. She forbade gifts that weren’t edible or experiential. She took up something like yoga—or dressed as though she had. The only possessions she accumulated were glass jars that she filled with dirt and placed on windowsills to grow mint for her tea. Whenever Fernando visited, his mother gave him Fall 2020 53.1 6 something to take away from the house—not as a gift, but to find a home for: her spoon collection, a crystal bowl, doorstoppers, a bag of washers, extra vacuum bags. At the time, Fernando had thought this to be just another one of her eccentricities.