The Bookends Review

The things you need
burn
watch your prayers travel in smoke & ash
some nights all raging spirits sleep
or your ikenga wrestles them
that orb diced in symmetry
one part revolts
the other misses the bullseye
you gather your prayers
in the fire’s heart
flames fanned faster, the necessary escape 
velocity
one part of you sours like Blues
yet taste the other
skin can be sweet in the second 
round
hear your jubilee 
burn
watch prayer mediate into silent 
ash.

– Victor Ogan…

...continue reading

                        I

My husband and I spotted the deer
lying in the woods
outside the college library.
Through a tunnel of green leaves,
she held our gaze.

Eighty years before our visit,
his mother came here to college,
a tall, shy girl burdened
by her mother’s expectations.

She found a young woman’s paradise.
Stately buildings on sloping lawns
housed lecture halls and classrooms,
dormitories and common rooms,
a dining hall with chandeliers
and murals on the walls.

There was a boathouse on the lake
and trails through the woods.
When she wasn’t studying,
she loved playing the piano
and sailing a Sunfish
on the silvery lake.

                        II

When Wells College was founded in 1868,
the founder’s son gave the school
a marble statue of Minerva.
It was a contemporary copy
of a Roman statue in the Vatican,
itself a replica of a Greek bronze.…

...continue reading

Carl Shikso squinted at the paper in front of him, gripping a ballpoint pen with such force his hand hurt.  Topping six feet, even without his plaster-flecked work boots, he barely fit into one of several narrow spaces arrayed about the room, back to a line of increasingly irate people he pictured staring daggers at him much as he’d done countless times when stuck behind a slowpoke at Home Depot.  The workday loomed and their impatience quickly gave way to hostility.

“Come ON, dude,” grumbled the owner of a gruff baritone seemingly to himself.  “How hard can it be?”  But Carl only half-noticed.

Spread around his ballot like a fan of mismatched cards was an assortment of political flyers.  Congressional endorsements from pro-choice celebrities slipped into his pocket, most likely by his little sister Gwen. …

...continue reading

I write stories, though nobody asks.

They come and I can’t help it.

I write a story about a girl…

In an old country, long ago, a girl is poor. Awkward, pubescent, alone. And likely bound for the convent, her family lacking means. But first to make sure it will do, a test. The girl must wash for the sisters, and what little she earns will help her family. As she works one day in the hot bright light, she is joined by an old nun. No, up close, she is still of middle age. The girl’s friends have always laughed at this lady—her flighty air, her whiskers. Her pointy beak of a nose! But as the girl works alongside the nun, discolored linens in the mangle, they discuss this girl’s sorry faith, all her doubts, her rage.…

...continue reading

Old Fort, North Carolina after Helene

Nobody asked you to come back.
You told yourself it was just to see the damage.
Just to see what would finally break.

The jukebox is still there—half-buried in silt behind the diner.
The glass is splintered, and when you trace the web,
your finger pulls back grit and a smear of blood.
She laughed at something you said, and you pretended not to notice.

You think about touching it. You don’t.
You think about “Fingertips,” the little Motown scream.
Whose music gets to stay? The song still plays in your head.
It tastes like the metal of the gas station pump on your tongue.…

...continue reading

In the years after Cameron Gordon died of a brain tumor, his sister Addie retreated to California, where she was in graduate school in comparative literature at Berkeley. She rarely came back to New York, usually only at the Christmas holidays. She had always been evasive and elusive. After Cameron’s death, she became more so.

At Berkeley, she got involved with a man who dominated her and alienated her from her friends. He was built like a fireplug with a muscled upper body. He had a German name, and our group of college friends referred to him among ourselves as “the Nazi.” I wondered if he were abusive to Addie, but I had no way of knowing, since we were barely in touch.

Eventually Addie broke up with him.…

...continue reading

“My tank is gonna shoot,” Steve Emmerich says as he pushes a toy tank forward. A gargling cannon noise explodes from his pre-pubescent mouth. His fingertip traces a shot from the tank barrel to a toy truck. He flips the truck over and dumps five plastic soldiers onto the floor.

“Yer soldiers never miss,” Michael Augustine says. “That’s unrealistic.”

“Of course they never miss. Why would I have them miss? That’s stupid.”

The front door creaks shut below them. Steve hears his mother’s muffled voice say something. Light, rapid footsteps launch up the stairs. Definitely not his mother. The footsteps turn toward his room.             

“You guys’ll never believe what I saw on my way over,” says Albion Winfrey, a boy of about the same age, who enters the room and plops down next to them.…

...continue reading