The Bookends Review

Don’t expect comfort
from the steady dripping
on porcelain

like someone’s fingers on a drum
in a continent
you must sleep to visit.

It’s not so hard being here
in the land of sleepwalkers
where the stars are cemented in place

until you vanish with them.
That’s not really confusion.
It’s like being in someone else’s dream.

Everything will be
the way you want it
whether you know it or not.

– Stan Sanvel Rubin…

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The spread of COVID-19 has greatly impacted the human experience of 2020 across the world. In addition to our shared illness—and our losses of loved ones, income, and stability—our attempts to combat the virus interrupt our ongoing need and search for human connection. Many of us are feeling painfully isolated. Even in these strange times, though, books continue to provide insight into these particularly human emotions, and they are a source of connection in and of themselves. One such book is The Bitter Kind.

The Bitter Kind by Tara Lynn Masih and James Claffey (Oct. 2020, Červená Barva Press) is a fascinating lyric novelette divided between two alternating points of view: Stela, a survivor of childhood abuse that follows her into a transient adulthood, and Brandy, a Chippewa orphan, a seer, deeply in tune with nature, and a drifter.It’s…

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– Anna Frankl…

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I can’t say the name of the school, but I guarantee you’ve heard of it, a world-renowned elementary school that looks like it should be the kind of bucolic liberal arts college where Donna Tartt might murder undergrads, only it was in Manhattan. That’s all I’ll say. I don’t want to give you too many clues. Legally, I can’t. 

I was introduced to the twins my first day. The headmistress had told me about their family during orientation. “We give all our students extra special attention,” she said. “We give the twinses extraordinary special attention.” She then gave me an extraordinarily slow wink. There were three sets of twins in this family. Thus, twinses. I was the only person who seemed to think that odd. Or be bothered by that grammatical choice.…

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I dredged the river of my childhood,
cajoled every voice, pressed every drop

of juice out of silence. Confidence
was an orchard in the sun, rays

revealing the shiny plumpness of apples.
Ripe. Ready. Like a ritual, every gesture

was its own reward, like the return
of the father in the sunset,

who was walking home
bringing a round loaf of bread

and a bottle of red wine as if nothing
had happened. As if he didn’t know

how long he’d been gone, his eyes
lit up: he liked what he saw.

– Lucia Cherciu…

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TAK Erzinger is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. Her poetry has been published by The Curlew, The Beautiful Space Journal, The Rising Phoenix Review, among many others, and her debut chapbook, found: between the trees, came out last year through Grey Borders Books. It chronicles a life interrupted by mental illness (specifically, PTSD) and explores how love and nature can help us find forgiveness and healing. She’s recently found a publisher for her second, lengthier poetry collection, been accepted to a writers/artist residency in Italy, and much more.

In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum chats with Erzinger about her artistry (both written and drawn), overcoming and normalizing mental illness, coping with the current pandemic and quarantine, and much more!…

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Will you taste as good in death
as you do in life?
You say that’s up to you, isn’t it?
After you’re cremated, you said,
you don’t wish
to be scattered, rather
you want to be spooned into my daily
morning espressos. I agree.
Sugar ruins the bitter
anyway. In Massachusetts
you’re mandated
to be burned in a coffin,
so I’m already imagining pine,
robin songs
trapped, Costco-brand
lacquer, the wood’s cheep
eons commingled with your tattoos
savory memory, the guttural
romance of your unmentionables,
every still-uncooked
bone. This delectable grief
should take years,
you say. Revolting how we’re supposed
to sit out eternity on a shrine,
or bubble wrapped in an attic,
or tossed to the wind
like a common grandmother.
No. Death, you say, must feed, nourish.…

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