The Bookends Review

I finish book drafts,
a dedication, footer-pagination. 
I tuck and roll
a few final arrangements

neatly justified.  Suburban life
similar in its style
manuals stream-lining formal
editing and copy.  Writing

a respite with current
change in the air. 
Shrinking margins offer burial
and discounts on ritual

exorcism.  I frequently overuse
words – blood, song, “light” –
sometimes cradles the unborn
fragments of memory dimmed …

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Dear Mr. Emperor,

Sorry to bug you with a letter, but I couldn’t find a suggestion box at your original 32^nd Ave location, and I didn’t want to trouble your devoted employees, who were busy offering samples, filling waffle cones, and making change. Not that you need any help from us peons: you’re the Emperor of Ice Cream!

And I’m your No. 1 Fan. Seriously. I was there at Ground Zero during the soft opening, followed by the grand opening, then two or three times a week, more often six or seven, for the past however many glorious years. My doctor has some concerns about my diet owing to my weight and cholesterol levels, but only because he’s a worrywart who’s never tasted two scoops of your Almond Brittle with Salted Ganache in a sugar cone.…

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These bitches didn’t even know I was ready.

“Just give me a reason to defend myself.”

I repeated this as a mantra in the parking lot of the Lauderdale Lakes Point Café. 

We were at the breaking point. Another week. Another battle.

I took a moment to consider my triggers. There was Ray. There was me being pregnant. There was obviously my mother. Which.

I wasn’t going to do it.

I wasn’t going to do it this time.

I wasn’t even going to bring up my mother.

I was the only one who ever brought up my mother.

Bringing up my mother was entirely in my control.

Even though, of course, as usual, she was driving me crazy.

But I wasn’t going to do it.…

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Why do I cry?
I saw a jewel.
No heart, no bones
and nerveless in
the pink postcoital light—

I am nowhere near done,
so you say
imagine an animal—
and I am taken
to the white core of
the Cambrian explosion,
bend in the heat and
emerge with an apple—

and we have bobbed in the tropics,
bobbed in the icy polar seas
and mindlessly scoured the floor—

stingers drawn
head and tail aglow with
Jamaica Farewell,
you catch a swell.

– Josh Lipson…

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For me, non-fiction has to meet a lot of requirements in order to be classified as a good read. I’m a curious person. Even a nosy one. I want to eavesdrop on the writer’s experiences and secret thoughts. I want to know what happened to them. I want to understand how they felt. And, most of all, I hope to discover profundity, some kind of wisdom about what it means to be alive. It’s a tall order, but I’ve found a book that fills it.

Relief by Execution: A Visit to Maunthausen by Gint Aras (Finding the Moon in Sugar, The Fugue) is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time. Lyrical and gripping while sparkling with wisdom, Aras leads his reader through darkness and despair to epiphany as he ruminates on his experiences of abuse, racism, ethnic identity, and the long-term effects of generational trauma.…

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There’s a scene in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia where she describes reading philosophy in all-night cafes, drinking black coffee after black coffee, while debating the materialist ontology.

This, I remembered thinking the moment I read the scene. This is what it is like to have anorexia. Forget the magazine obsessive, model-thin striving stereotype that I had seen again and again and again. This was the ‘real’ anorexic–not a hunger for beauty or thinness, but a hunger for knowledge and nothing but. As Hornbacher states in several places in the memoir, being bulimic was something bodily, corporeal–while anorexia was ethereal, saint-like. To be an anorectic was to be knowledge incarnate.

The first time I read Marya Hornbacher’s memoir, I was twenty.…

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I. depression as the contained

The white ceiling above my bed is swirling
Into flowers and faces. I should probably look away
But looking away means acknowledging the swelling
Of my abdomen and that means acknowledging
The advice I’ve ignored—to go for brisk walks
To eat a tablespoon of hot sauce
To pray for the faith to be restored,
As if I haven’t already prayed till I cried as if
That isn’t why I’m too drained to do much else
To roll over, to press my feet into the stirrups,
To push. Who am I if not pregnant
With stagnancy and rot? Is there anything else?
This burning like nausea, this deep squeezing
Instinct to escape flooding my dirty sheets—
God it’s stuck
Like a seed in my teeth
An eyelash in my eye
A tumor on my abdominal wall, God
Cut me open.…

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