The Bookends Review

– Sue-min Agnes Jung…

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From light years away,
stars crowd the Altiplano sky.

Inside the bus, careening
through green lights, we are bumper cars:

            the gnarled man in the ball cap, bouncing, eyes closed,
crumpled grocery bag clenched in his lap,

            the girl with long wet hair, rocking in her single seat, 
a book too close to her face, crying,

            and the thick man in the white-white long-sleeve shirt,
radiating garlic and cooking oil, one hand
tight to a seat frame as he stands,…

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Years before Mother shut herself
in the bathroom with Clairol Ruby Rage

and a flask of double-malt, a man
was stealing blond girls from yards.

She threatened to darken our hair,
but took us with her to work instead:

we clicked teeth on articulators
and judged their bites, twirled rope

wax over the blue flame
of the Bunsen burner. Mother pulled

our hair into knots, but some escaped
into the fire. Singed, reeking, it curled

into itself like a thirsty field of wheat.

– Katherine Fallon…

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“Anything is better than being homeless,” says Rose Labbe in a thick accent that basks in the warmth of her island heritage. She is a middle aged Haitian woman and is seated with her legs crossed on a black wooden crate in the backyard of her three bedroom house. She is five feet two, caramel skinned, and dons a blue scarf on her head in a wrapped style. Her dress is red and matches the color of her eyes which signals the many hours of work she puts in as a part-time McDonald’s employee and full time Amazon warehouse worker.

Seated on her throne of a crate, she gives me the likening of a tired Erzulie, a figure of strength and passion in her native homeland ready to take on any obstacle and carry on a life cognizant of a faraway American dream; one she probably formed as she watched different American sitcoms on her antenna TV in Haiti seven years ago.…

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somelucky – April 10 at 9:23 PM

I’m going to bed, I’ve got a job interview tomorrow. Sleep well and wish me good luck in the morning!

hydrangea-spring – April 10 at 9:24 PM

lol nice, hopefuly they hire u! im goin to bed too, night!

hydrangea-spring – April 11 at 10:03 AM

i overslept srry, i guess ur already gone. gl anyway!! i hope you get that dream job of urs!!

hydrangea-spring – April 11 at 12:39 PM

u back yet?

hydrangea-spring – April 11 at 2:09 PM

lol dude i found a super cool site u gotta check out!! lmk when ur back!

hydrangea-spring – April 11 at 8:12 PM

dude?

hydrangea-spring – April 12 at 7:38 AM

hey gm man!

my friends taking me out for brakfast so ill be back in an hour or so!…

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Flower girl in white cotton
and white petals, look at them rot
in the aisle, like bruises
on ballerina heels,
she’s all cracked callouses
and pink skirts, a porcelain doll,
she is skinny but her tears are fat as cherubs.

They let the doves out of the box and
put the pictures in,
the dust will fall like feathers,
make a veil.

And your old clothes stretch
and your new clothes shrink
and you go back to the beginning.

– Aimee Lowenstern…

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The world outside of California hardly noticed the blaze destroying Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. Although it was the worst library fire in American history, it was largely ignored for it coincided with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Library fires, often started deliberately, are not rare events in the USA and elsewhere. There have been many such fires throughout history. Caesar set alight the library at Alexandria. The Nazis were infamous book burners. Often what is gone is irreplaceable. Manuscripts and early editions vanish, taking part of human memory and identity with them. Something more than paper burns. Something of life itself is lost.

There are also heroic tales of rescue. Susan Orlean in The Library Book, recounts the fire in a Russian library in 1988 when a crowd of onlookers defied the police, firefighters and bulldozers by rescuing as many books as possible, taking them home and drying them out.…

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