The Bookends Review

            Mother pushes us out the door and across the porch, yelling for us to hurry up, like it’s a race to see who gets there first.  The sound of her keys jingling around worries me, making me wonder what would happen if she dropped them down between the slats of wood beneath our feet.  My sister freezes in place, tears in her eyes even as she tries to hold them back – and I realize she’s holding us back.  Her feet are bare like mine, but I’ve already made it to the car while hers are stuck in place; our black cat walks over and rubs up against her leg, unaware that this is an emergency. 

            “Come on,” my mother says, reaching her arm out, urging my sister to get in the car. …

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A fledgling fell from the steep
elm branches last night, never learning
to fly. We crept over dew, thinking it asleep,
and learned the truth.

Hallmark strangeness
of childhood, finding things can die.
Like learning our parents had names,
it tumbled us out of ourselves
into an expanding world
where the metallic twist of pennies
on tongues echoed
in blood.

Life released slowly to us, unfolding
its creases—a map of courtesies
letting us stay small and close.
But it rushed
when we lifted feathers
limp and cold, light,
and folded death in a box
atop a broken nest.

If life came all at once,
we could never learn to breathe,
to speak. Never learn bird and flight and tree,
fall or death or broken,
never blink
or become ourselves.…

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Ari Rosenschein is a Seattle-based writer whose essays and fiction appear in Entropy, Noisey, Drunk Monkeys, P.S. I Love You, Observer, The Big Takeover, PopMatters, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles. A lifelong musician, Ari currently records and performs with his bands, The Royal Oui and STAHV. He lives with his wife and dog and enjoys the woods, the rain, and the coffee of his chosen region. Coasting is his first book.

In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Rosenschein about the creation and reception of Coasting, as well as his experiences as a musician and music journalist.

– Ari Rosenschein

…

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We all start in water ‒ endure its fullness,
bellies hoarding each molecule,
the swell of its ocean yelling
to our bones.

So when her tide breaks,
she’s hauled from
the house with the knowledge
she’s rupturing.

I brim mid-stride
on the uneven pavement, split our blood
for the first time. She watches me
glisten across tarmac,

takes her fulsome weight from the kerb
to the taxi, hopes to replenish
us both with a sack full of saline,
knows

she’s not the right one
to receive the cuckoo-baby nestling
in the thud of her pelvic bones.

– Abegail Morley…

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You are four years old. Your father hands you a brick. He says, “This is lighter than it feels.”

You are in a garage. The walls are cluttered with newspaper – photos of aftermaths. Rusted tools hang from the ceiling. The concrete floor is splattered with grease. Your father grunts against a band saw. Sawdust floats into your breath.

You drop the brick while you are testing its lightness. You stare at the blood. You stare at your separation. Your toenail ripped off. The flesh underneath is hot pink. You can’t remember if you cried.

Your father begins sanding wood.

– Heather Warren…

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Women tend to apologize. I, a woman, toss apologies here & there, as if playing ring toss to win the world. I do not aim at a singular target. I pick up ducks whose colored dots mean something—a different reason for guilt. & guilt-trips, though they are inherently trips, burrow me, the traveler, in inner-city first-floor hotel rooms, where the view is dark & damp; frankly there is no view at all. Women, my apologies. I am #sorrynotsorry for the #sorrynotsorry movement, which did not win the war on apology, but did equip the troops with a bossier attitude. People who interact with me, including women, take my apologies for granted; another shipment lies in wait.

The apology epidemic extends to women writers, specifically those writing nonfiction.…

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1.

There is only one thing more complicated than living in Venezuela and that is dying in Venezuela. Caribbean bureaucracy has a predilection for making people’s lives as miserable as possible, even beyond the earthly boundaries. Lencho was well aware of this, as was everyone else in the country. But after his daughter’s death, he was naively hoping for some sort of institutional mercy. Or, truth to be told, he wasn’t.

He had learned from a very early age not expect anything from anyone, particularly from those in charge of signing and stamping paper. Those, under the supervision of others who also had to sign and stamp some other papers but never without previously obtaining a different stamp and signature from someone else above.…

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