Something Awful 21 Charlie Clark the Inner Life 83 Angel Crespo [Translated by Steven J
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New Orleans Review 1 New Oreans Review Volume 33 Number 2 2 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 3 cover art: EDITOR Float, 2007 Christopher Chambers Jack Niven FICTION EDITOR frontispiece: Robert Bell Printer, 2005 Harold Baquet POETRY EDITOR Katie Ford book design: Christopher Chambers TRANSLATIONS EDITOR Sophia Stone ASSOCIATE POETRY EDITORS Mary Szybist Mark Yakich New Orleans Review, founded in 1968, is published by Loyola Uni- versity New Orleans. Loyola University is a charter member of the ASSOCIATE FICTION EDITORS Association of Jesuit University Presses. New Orleans Review reads Dale Hrebik unsolicited submissions of poetry, Wction, nonWction, and transla- Amanda Regan tions year round. Subscriptions $14 per year; $24 outside u.s. No Kelly Wilson portion of New Orleans Review may be reproduced without written BUSINESS MANAGER 195 permission. Send all correspondence to New Orleans Review, Box , Amberly Fox Loyola University, New Orleans, LA 70118. For more information and back issues, visit us at www.loyno.edu/~noreview. Contents ART EDITOR listed in the pmla Bibliography, the Index of American Periodical Laura Camille Tuley Verse, and Humanities International Complete. Printed in the Unit- ed States. Copyright 2007 by Loyola University New Orleans. All INTERNS rights reserved. Distributed by Ingram Periodicals. issn: 0028-6400 Michael Barnhart, Donna Burke, Morgan Carattini, Julia Carey, Ashley Chapman, Catherine Goulet, Meg Hardwick, Darrah Haworth, Jessica Kinnison, Taylor Murrow, Kelly Rayner CONTRIBUTING EDITORS John Biguenet, Jeffrey Chan, John Gery, Michael Lee V LOYOLA Peggy McCormack, Ashley Scha er, Marcus Smith UNIVERSITY FOUNDING EDITOR NEW ORLEANS Miller Williams 4 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 5 contents Piotr Florczyk Psalm 48 E. B. Vandiver Milk Teeth 51 Harold Baquet 17th Street Canal 10 poetry feature: Harold Schweizer Shane McCrae 62 Of Movements and Signs 11 Won’t 63 [We married in a dislocated shoul-] 64 Jynne Dilling Martin [We married on a speeding train the roof] 66 All the Day Summarized When We Exhale 14 Recovery 67 In Which Our Poet Jugs a Hare 16 Mausoleum 68 A Man is Stalked by a White Arctic Fox 18 [Lord God Lord Basket Lord gather them in] 69 Joel Long The Honey and the Frost 70 The Healing (Ars Poetica) 19 Ghosts 71 Joshua A Ware Startle and After 72 [Chaucer authors the distance…] 20 Eva Talmadge Samuel Ligon Northern 74 Something Awful 21 Charlie Clark The Inner Life 83 Angel Crespo [translated by Steven J. Stewart] A Tree 37 Sarah Perrier Stones Against Stones 38 Lesser Beasts 84 On Nothingness 39 John Casteen The Word “No” 40 The Gift 86 Harold Baquet Polestar 88 Farrier 43 Insomnia II 89 Kevin Craft Shira Dentz Mussels 44 Sing to me, sing to me too 90 Anne Heide Scott McWaters PondBee 46 Fruits to Be Eaten in Hell 92 Sea Pig 47 The Sunrise Club 94 6 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 7 David Parker Kevin Powers This Old Man 97 Elegy for an Old Woman Found Hanging 154 photography feature: in a New England Asylum Harold Baquet 98 David Francis City of Curiosities (Baltimore, 1820s) 157 Laura Camille Tuley An Interview with Harold Baquet 108 Michael J. Lee poetry feature: The Vengeful Men 158 Paul Guest 117 Country Home 162 To-Do List 118 Jason Kerzinski Rented Dark 120 Epidemic 164 Elegiac Forecast 122 Godspeed 165 Accent 124 Preemptive Elegy 126 Cynthia Arrieu-King & Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis Elegy for the Plesiosaur on the Advent of Its Predicted Return 128 The Small Anything City 166 Beginning in the Lost and Unclaimed Baggage Center Obey Gravity 168 in Scottsboro, Alabama 130 Samuel Amadon Sails in the Trees 170 Garry Craig Powell The Arab Mind 132 Rick Bursky Cody Lumpkin Then What 172 In Support of Corporate Farms 148 The Virtu 173 Mary Kaiser Henrietta Goodman Shakertown 149 Hell: Detail of a Couple in Bed 174 Adam Clay Lynne Potts Tipsy Resignation 175 Poem Beginning with a Line from Tranströmer 150 Jodi Narde Christina Pugh Ruins and Requiem 176 Water Music 151 Book Reviews 185 dawn lonsinger Incidental Love Poem 152 Contributors 197 Backyard 153 8 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 9 harold schweizer Of Movements and Signs Like an outstretched arm is my call. —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Seventh Elegy” All of our movements are signs, all of them are particular to each one of us, each movement of the body, even the way one looks up to check the time—she holds her hand to her face, she moves her head when she hears her name called, each movement is intimate, a sign of herself and of her singularity and of each moment in time— Movements of the body are illegible because they are made across almost impassable distances; most of them remain unseen like the swinging of branches or the bending of lilies under the rain or ash, acorn and oak leaves wafting in scaled clumps deep in the current of the river or the rising of the cold of the earth— If seen they are merely thought of as the movements of matter (the bending of flowers, the turning of 17th Street Canal 10 New Orleans Review New Orleans Review 11 the hand); many of them are someone carries a cup across purposeful and explicable, to which a room to a sick child, the child category belong even the intimate sits up in the graying light adjustments we make when we cry slowly lifting a hand towards and shift slightly in a chair, the cup and all is still for a moment although each movement (the and there are voices across utilitarian gait being the most the distance and signs. singular), if decipherable, would be utterly revealing— Time is a void to leap across. She calculates the hours until she can Someone in the distance would go to sleep, like a jumper who raise an arm to answer, and we needs a certain distance to gain would turn our faces and lift our her speed and turns to face hands in response to the sign the distance, and the slight movement of the arm, and these would be of her face scrapes the lacuna, interstices, openings she looks up, and her breath turns each to the other— in the scales of night, and she holds her hand out— The abrasions of grief in the tissues that had turned into cysts and inflammations hard to the touch would have been lifted like the lids on boxes swelled in storage, and the thread roots of breath would have been white and exposed. She turns her hand reaching up to seize something, she hears voices, 12 New Orleans Review NewHarold Orleans Schweizer Review 13 jynne dilling martin All the Day Summarized When We Exhale To know what it is to slay and be slain, and how there is no difference— —for T. G. then you will know what it is you want, then I can give you the nations, Ask and I will give the nations to you, you who have not known to ask— their flags, their legislatures and municipal towers, their sewers and snow, an abacus bead slid so long in one dimension that you thought their arbitrary borders and the soldiers who patrol them day and night, there was only this: to figure into the complex calculations of others, pistol barrels slowly wiped with cloths, every bullet that will and will not be fired, I will give you the lungs of every creature tautening with air, thumbed on the margins of inscrutable quadratic machinations. Not to be the frogman with a harpoon descending deep, not how they then deflate over and over and without sorrow. to be his rippling slippery-scaled prey, not his mask, his oiled suit, his rusted blade slid inside so many enemy bellies— merely the one who admired his hunt in a romantic picturebook, drawings of gods and strangled dragons put back on a long ago shelf. You always confused why and how you failed. You mixed up strangers and relatives, skies and sheets, mistook wallpaper patterns for stains, brochures for colorful journeys, persons surrounded by smoke for saints. Ride your horse down a rocky bank until both of you are crushed— what other way to begin again. If you do not have a horse I will give one to you for this purpose, with legs weak as yours and its tongue cut out so there will be no abrupt neigh as its front knees buckle under, instead will come a roar of all you never heard: the sound of bones, of solitary monks kneeling in caves, an apricot swelling, closed wounds. 14 New Orleans Review NewJynne Orleans Dilling ReviewMartin 15 jynne dilling martin In Which Our Poet Jugs a Hare to their spines so predators behind and sideways can’t be seen, the patient’s brain with a foot-long needle inserted undetected. The goats of Angora, frequently dipped in mountain streams, misunderstand this gentle river ablution to be loving affection Explain that one: empirical evidence puncturing the skull and still your mind doesn’t know that needle is up there. and likewise, my darling twitch-nosed love, I fattened you on sausage and carrot casserole, buttered crumbs patted on top, Even the police confess that how such stains got on everyone’s kitchen floors, or even what animal they came from, no one can tell. bowls of clover milk and rinsed green globes of iceberg lettuce, not so we could hold plump paws and whisk into the sunset, no. Untold hungers leave me holding you upside-down, beheaded, your blood escaping hotly down the drain of this porcelain basin, all four stove burners blazing.