As writers and artists, it is our job to bear witness in order to impart the deeper truth. In this issue of Grain, my last as editor, I wanted to speak of hope, not just strife. As in previous issues, the work examines and exemplifies the myriad of emotions and realities we all experience, particularly now. As editor, I have striven to represent diversity in both visual and literary art.
I want to thank all contributors for trusting us to do justice to your writing, and Joan Butterfield for her exceptional artwork. I would also like to thank Grain readers for keeping the magazine alive. Now, as outgoing editor, I can look back and reflect on the challenges and accomplishments and say, with gratitude, that it has been a great opportunity.
Thank you all!
Temporarily Venus | Antony Di Nardo
I see her winter mornings with her cane
Beauty is a factor in the distribution of light and shadow
If I wore a painter’s smock I’d paint her figure blurred and blue,
an ageless blue that borders on the gray of constellations
She carries herself with the grace of fall-ripened fruit
I peer into the orchard of her ascent across the bridge
and see the coming spring about to burst its banks
When summer’s here she’ll rest her cane across my lap
THE TRILLER [Excerpt] | Ben Lof
Davis stood in Pigeon Lake surrounded by blooms of algae, the surface like a flattened globe, bright land on soupy water. Gods with rolling pins had been here. The lake was the only place you could forget about the bugs crashing into every surface at Hanna’s family cabin. Weekly plagues of mayflies, midges, horseflies, houseflies, mosquitoes, blue bottles, moths, spiders, daddy long legs. In your hair, your ears, down your shirt, in your books, on your food, webs and smears on every armrest, umbrella, cushion. Sometimes you’d open your mouth to eat or speak and in they went, caught by tongue or breathed in toward lungs.
TRYING TO GET HOME [Excerpt] | Robert Currie
It’s the dream I have again and again, the boy
I once was heading for South Hill, needing
to get home, right now, it’s important. I take
the subway under the tracks, follow First Avenue
up the hill, the sidewalk awkward and sluggish.
Every step feels as if I’m pulling my feet
from concrete that isn’t quite set, I’m out
of breath, but I keep going, don’t want
to be caught here, held like a statue
with gulls wheeling off the river and pigeons
ready to crap on my head.
WANE [Excerpt] | August Reynolds
He has been here many times before, only he doesn’t remember. The bus takes him from the Palmdale Assisted Living and Rehabilitation Center at 11:00 a.m. and follows State Route fourteen deep into the Mojave Desert twice weekly. Usually Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was a Saturday. He seemed to think it was a fine bus. It ran. He seemed to be alone on this front, too. “Doll, my sweet doll,” he said. “Where are we going?”
The caregiver to his right ensnared his hand. Gently, though, as if picking up a baby bird, careful to intertwine the fingers in the right order, and lifted the jumbled mess onto his lap, palm up, and said, “To see Cheryl, Dr. Caldwell, she promised to cook you that pasta dish you like.”
There is a warmth to her that he couldn’t quite place, like he was a bee drawn to a pot of honey left out in the July sun. She sat nearest to the aisle and their arms pressed into one another whenever the bus hit a dip in the road.
CHOIR TOUR [Excerpt] | Catherine St. Denis
We exited the airport flanked by soldiers
cradling machine guns. The air was wound
tight as floss around a finger. Artifacts
of grief punctuated the causeway—wilting
flowers still in cellophane, hollow stumps of wax,
teddy bears blanching in the sun. All day,
heat rose from the streets, spilled sideways
towards the beach where we winced
as jagged pebbles betrayed our soft feet.
