The Bookends Review

There are geese in the road
a monogamous pair protecting

five goslings from the onslaught
of morning traffic
like many families
they knit together in times of change
times of great movement
unbearable crisis

here they cross
Silicon Beach tenderly
bookending their nestlings
from the Metro we
know human urgency waits
for no one
least of all these. …

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            Born to order, off the fossil record, I may
have as many half-life crises as I like. The closing
question hypothetical, I aced my metaphysical
examination. Calibrated down, I’m dead to heaven
yet. While looking over my left shoulder I walk
backwards. I walk where the state of nature was.
While compensating for obliquity I convert every
moon-lit soft spot to a horizontal. To soft spots I
say, Go easy on the realism – realism is thin ice.

– Heikki Huotari

Author’s Note: “My Body Is My Canvas” is a manifestation of my current program of zooming in on the fractal boundary between what I see and what I think about what I see. In this case, what I saw was a YouTube video about an exercise fad in Japan, walking backwards, and what I thought I thought while trying it out myself.…

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James A. Cox is the Editor-in-Chief of the highly popular and comprehensive Midwest Book Review, which hosts nine monthly book review magazines such as The Reviewer’s Bookwatch and Internet Bookwatch (which are written by volunteer reviewers), while the other magazines are by Midwest Book Review and associates.

How did you become the Editor-in-Chief of The Midwest Book Review physically located in Wisconsin?

In the summer of 1976 I was sitting in a Wednesday night meeting of the Madison Science Fiction Club in a State Street restaurant. The purpose of our weekly get-togethers was to socialize with like minded folk for whom fantasy and science fiction were something more than just another hobby.

Into that night’s gathering came a good friend of mine by the name of Hank Luttrell.…

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Eve at forty’s dissatisfied
with the shape of her hips 
& having to correct the record—
the scratching out, the adding in.
If given her youth to live again,
she’d’ve covered up & found 
a quiet corner of the garden
away from need & distraction,
away from the constant pummeling
rainbows & seedless grapes.
She’d wanted to be a mother,
but not the mother of all,
the butt of jokes, the fractured rib,
when it was merely a moment 
of weakness & slight despair.
You, too, encounter moments
of weakness & slight despair,
when its easier simply to let go
& see what tomorrow brings.
There were no pills to halt 
the onslaught, no backup plan.
God, she thinks, it was just a flash,
and then quite suddenly 
she was denied ice cream forever
& lightning bugs & strolls in the park.…

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            I require angels—
                                             Antonin Artaud

Two angels, weary, find a coffee shop,
order black coffee with their perfect minds.
A baffled server sets white mugs behind
a limp flower. The rising sunlight stops
above the bloom. A laughing man mops
the sidewalk. The angels send him tired joy
and stare at the black surface of their cups
still seeing marked doors they counted, annoyed,
all night. They don’t like knowing who will die
each day. Their long wings—folded, undeployed—
sag. They know that the coffee’s only a symbol
and they are tired of those, too. One gambles
on a scone, dropping coins as a decoy
sin. They both wish they were able to lie.

– Mark Mitchell…

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I. The Garden

An enchantress sighs in the room you thought empty, clearing a place for you. She calls out, this seductive crone, in a language you almost recall. She needs to remind you of something, but you have no way to respond beyond the ghost-like assent of your presence. Beyond the barking of the dogs, below the level of speech is a place that grants access, so you enter. She carries a lifetime of pain and loss. Hers is an unassailable grief that finds release in the few remaining joys left to her—calling birds down from the trees and feeding them from the palm of her hand, bathing throughout the moonlit night in the tropical garden, loving the humid air that pours the essence of jasmine, lemongrass and nightshade across the ravaged contours of her flesh, a white cat the sole witness to the forms she takes in her purposeful flight from pure earth to pure light.…

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A bottle and Styrofoam container against the passionflowers
the silver-streaked scrub hopper, took to the chestnut light:

what we resist, breathlessly we visit in our sleep
like the Fritillary among the bog, drawn from long nectar pints:

when I was born, I stood origin-less like the hunger along the Rio Grande.
Among the stray flight on brush stalk, a selective mutism

reticulated, variegated, an artifact that crossed from Mexico
from Sonoran folkloric sustenance, and in the gulf, chestnut sunlight,

stamped out an unseen pirouette, breathless, like a Cordera
sung to later generations struggling to resist, inherited

on a day-laborer’s rucksack, Regal Fritillaries disappeared from the East
in the late 1970s; now a Calvary belts out in strands along abandoned Forts

near dried-cracked Pastures: the softest part of a rose preexisted
the emerging violets in their fragility last forever:

no one noticed, not even in a eulogy, when the last one dropped. …

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