The Modern Writer As Witness
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The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Witness Mountain Institute Winter 2019 Witness: The Modern Writer as Witness Amitai Ben-Abba Mills College Bruce Bond University of North Texas Dakota Canon Claire Roberts Global Literary Management Laura Cesarco EGlin Simmons College Kate Finegan Longleaf Review Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/witness See P nextart of page the forCreativ additionale Writing authors Commons , and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Ben-Abba, Amitai; Bond, Bruce; Canon, Dakota; EGlin, Laura Cesarco; Finegan, Kate; Greenberg, Miriam Bird; Kercheval, Jesse Lee; Krebs, Josef; Krieg, Brandon; Lee, Cody; Mok, Zining; Noel, Aimee; Petersen, Martha; Polonskaya, Anzhelina; Quotah, Eman; Raymond, Tim; Rosaler, Maxine; Rzicznek, F. Daniel; Severo, Fabian; Silberman, Sarah Mollie; Thompson, Jean; Weelerbacon, Amber; Whitcomb, Amy A.; Wilkinson, Caroline; Winet, Kristin; and Wright, Carolyne, "Witness: The Modern Writer as Witness" (2019). Witness. 1. https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/witness/1 This Book is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Book in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Book has been accepted for inclusion in Witness by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Authors Amitai Ben-Abba, Bruce Bond, Dakota Canon, Laura Cesarco EGlin, Kate Finegan, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Josef Krebs, Brandon Krieg, Cody Lee, Zining Mok, Aimee Noel, Martha Petersen, Anzhelina Polonskaya, Eman Quotah, Tim Raymond, Maxine Rosaler, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Fabian Severo, Sarah Mollie Silberman, Jean Thompson, Amber Weelerbacon, Amy A. Whitcomb, Caroline Wilkinson, Kristin Winet, and Carolyne Wright This book is available at Digital Scholarship@UNLV: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/witness/1 IN THIS ISSUE POETRY Bruce Bond, Carolyne Wright, Miriam Bird Greenberg, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Josef Krebs, Aimee Noel, Brandon Krieg, Anzhelina Polonskaya, a magazine of the black mountain institute vol. xxxii no. 2 | winter 2019 | $14 Fabián Severo Threshold FICTION Eman Quotah, Amitai Ben-Abba, Cody Lee, Jean Thompson, Caroline Wilkinson, Kate Finegan, Amy A. Whitcomb, Maxine Rosaler, Dakota Canon, Tim Raymond, Sarah Mollie Silberman, Amber Wheeler Bacon NONFICTION Martha Petersen, Kristin Winet, Zining Mok COVER PHOTO Shravya Kag VOL. XXXII NO. 2 | WINTER 2019 vol. xxxii no. 2 | winter 2019 2 | winter 2019 vol. xxxii no. volume xxxii number 2 | winter 2019 witnessmag.org WITNESS | VOLUME XXXII NUMBER 2 | WINTER 2019 Contents 1 Editor’s Note POETRY 6 Bruce Bond Southern Music 15 Carolyne Wright Shadow Palimpsests 52 Miriam Bird Greenberg Of Kampong & Creekbank 70 F. Daniel Rzicznek Memorial for the Apollonian Ichor 71 F. Daniel Rzicznek Memorial for a Cresting Wave 96 Josef Krebs Moving so slowly I barely am somnambulant 115 Aimee Noel Delayed Internment 138 Brandon Krieg Sick Georgic 146 Anzhelina Polonskaya And the Aspens Fade Away 147 Anzhelina Polonskaya To the Two of You 148 Fabián Severo Thirty-eight FICTION 19 Eman Quotah Blood Qur’an 26 Amitai Ben-Abba The Golem Self-Defense Collective 38 Cody Lee Stingray 72 Jean Thompson Circe 116 Caroline Wilkinson Dear Kay 119 Kate Finegan Keeper 124 Amy A. Whitcomb In which x does and does not eclipse y 128 Maxine Rosaler Hospitality 143 Dakota Canon It Happens Like This 151 Tim Raymond Countdown 161 Sarah Mollie Silberman Third Date 172 Amber Wheeler Bacon North, Toward Loris NONFICTION 10 Martha Petersen Remnants 58 Kristin Winet On the Dark Shores of the Delta 97 Zining Mok Cosmopolis 179 Notes on Contributors Editor in Chief Jarret Keene Managing Editor Tamar Peterson Community Editor Lindsay Olson Poetry Editor Samuel Gilpin Assistant Poetry Editor Sreshtha Sen Fiction Editor Wendy Wimmer Assistant Fiction Editor Carrieann Cahall Nonfiction Editor Scott Hinkle Assistant Nonfiction Editor Cody Gambino Readers Alexandra Murphy Chantelle Mitchell Flavia Stefani Jordan Sutlive Veronica Klash Dylan Fisher Daynee Rosales Ariana Turiansky MaryCourtney Ning Erin Piasecki Anthony Farris Jo O’Lone-Hahn Chelsi Sayti Ruth Larmore Kathryn McKenzie Publisher Joshua Wolf Shenk, Executive Director Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute Founding Editor Peter Stine (1987-2006) Witness (ISSN 0891-1371) is published by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine is indexed by and available electronically from EBSCO, Humanities International Complete, and Gale. Subscriptions are $12 for one year and $18 for two. Sample copies and back issues, when available, are $10. Orders can be made at our website. Correspondence should be addressed to Witness, Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Box 455085, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-5085 or [email protected]. We invite submissions of fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary essays. Work should be submitted online at witness.blackmountaininstitute.org. We do not accept submissions by post or email. Set in Freight, a typeface designed by Joshua Darden. Printed by The Sheridan Press. Distributed by Ingram Periodicals, Ubiquity Distributors, and Armadillo Trading, Inc. All material copyright © 2019 by Witness. Editor’s Note HE UNITED STATES, AS A society, is on the brink of profound and positive change. Demographically and culturally, things are improving, and the T reason is obvious to people who study history: Conflict pushes us to be better, to strive for principled goals. Consider the inspired eco-advocacy of Greta Thunberg. Or the swearing in of most diverse class of lawmakers in history into the 116th Congress. Or billionaire Robert F. Smith’s pledge to pay off every Morehouse College (in Atlanta, Georgia) student’s debt. Indeed, there are many good people helping and great moments happening in spite of a bleak 24-hour news cycle designed to ruin happiness and to limit our understanding of our human potential. We at Witness see this yearning for transformation in the works we selected. The doorway must be crossed, and the voices and characters we featured in our Winter 2019 issue stand at the vestibule, ready for the light to warm them, primed to fight for that necessary illumination. Every page of this issue is marked with promise of change. The haunting cover photo by artist Shravya Kag. The image of a “a boy playing a shiny trumpet, made of air” in Bruce Bond’s poem “Southern Music.” The unsteady narrator in Amitai Ben-Abba’s “The Golem Self-Defense Collective,” who discovers that her messy efforts to protect her Jewish kin have ultimately reaped fantastic results. The shattering moment in Martha Petersen’s essay “Remnants,” as the author and her fellow funerary co-workers are preparing a body for cremation, when we flash to an earlier scene in which her infant son suffers a terrifying asthma attack, requiring eerily similar care from ER attendants (and, spoiler, he thankfully survives). Every piece of writing in this issue takes us to the brink of disaster and shows us courage, resilience, and a desire to accomplish good in the face of evil. We are delighted with the sequence of the works, too—how, for example, the poetic compression of Carolyne Wright’s poem “Shadow Palimpsests,” with its elegiac five-syllable lines, foreshadows the conditional darkness of Eman Quotah’s hard-bitten tale of refuge, “Blood Qur’an.” We are grateful for the chance to share these works with you. We are also excited to debut a new format for our online issue. With any luck, you’re reading our issue as a beautifully designed PDF on the Kindle Cloud Reader. We hope you enjoy the experience of reading the latest issue, and we know many of you reading this foreword are writers yourselves. Take our invitation to heart: Send us your most emotionally stirring work, please. Witness is waiting to hear from you. Cross the threshold and join us. WITNESS 5 BRUCE BOND Southern Music Music is quick, lithe, incisive as a bullet, however slow the measure. Out of the wound the gut the throat the horn the little dish of ashes at the table, through the chatter of the glasses and bottles on the wall and into the street where a boy is playing a shiny trumpet made of air, music arrives a little early. Nameless, new, unrepentant. And the song is blue as the day is hot, which is why he plays it, because some days the beauty in the sky in the barbed fields of cotton hurts, and the music gets it, gets oddly specific where there are no words, no Louisiana yet, no coin of the realm. Whatever the passage, it is changing hands, because, to hell with that and that, it says, 6 BRUCE BOND POETRY and the strange new hand on another’s arm is here and gone and here again, changed again and slightly more at home. And the horns are growing brighter, bolder. And the smoke in a woman’s body is breaking into laughter. ... The gun that takes the elephant down, the roar of the great beneficent beast and the dust that rises, the slave who saws through the cream of the ivory, the five men bought to carry, the one in five who dies of exhaustion, the roar of the great beneficent wind and the spume it raises, the long sea journey, the one in five ships chained to the dead who go down with it, the look of the drowned in the living, the open eye of the departed, WITNESS 7 the song of the wreck on the ocean floor: they are bound, all of them, for the grand pianos of Europe, where a composer, an insomniac, beaten as a child, a solitary man, a nervous temper and a hair-storm in his prime, will lay his fingers on the white keys, whose names dissolve, because he is just that full of some vague demand, something he forgot as a boy and never did remember.