The Bookends Review

– Edward Supranowicz…

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For Mi Dya U

Jeanne turned and smiled at her lunch guests. Not long before this charade was over.

She held the first two plates – salmon roulade, rocket leaves, a drizzle of balsamic reduction – in either hand as she approached the huge cedar dining table beneath their kitchen’s weathered eaves.

Her husband, James Bassett, looked round at her fondly as she approached the table, his glasses sliding slightly down his nose. He’d started sweating already. But then, that was hardly surprising when you were forty pounds overweight.

“Here we go”, Jeanne announced with a forced grin.

She set a plate down in front of Dave’s girlfriend, a blonde twig in her early thirties who looked like she hadn’t eaten a full meal in years.…

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It’s Monday night, and a car is blocking the dumpster
with the DO NOT BLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT sign on it.
And there was never any hope that things would go as hoped.

Walking home from my job I wanted, on the morning of day one,
to love, I might as well be putting a book over my heart and allowing
the bullet through anyway. There was never any hope for such a thing

as being born to be ecstatic about everything.
The traffic at this intersection is just terrible. The little store
sells beer to minors. I’m out of gum. I refuse to go in there,

where the light of the world is so dim.
God knows when you’re in a rotten mood
you should just examine your knuckles,

as much as your skin will allow, get home
from your job, or wherever you’ve been,
and sit down and examine your invisible

prowess.…

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The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat
beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around            forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed           he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about (True Grit 42).

I was raised Methodist and have thought a lot about it. Most of my thinking occurred after I left the church, for while I was a member, what I mainly thought about was the drudgery of attending Sunday school and church each week; the horror of the torturous deaths in both testaments; and the reality that my only interests in attending church at all were (1) singing hymns both in the choir on Sunday evenings and in the congregation on Sunday morning, and (2) sitting next to my adolescent peers on those same mornings, playing games of hangman or, if I were really lucky, rubbing legs with some equally squirmy girl.…

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When I was younger, my mother turned into
oncoming traffic & I was too scared

to interrupt her—to warn her of the cars
coming towards us. I thought silent was the right

thing to be. Since then I’ve never been confident
in my body & its abilities. I see full trash bags

in fields or on busy streets. I want to tear into them
& look inside, hoping I will find the body

someone went looking for, so it is no longer left
unclaimed—decomposing alone, becoming

a host & a habitat for everything avoidable.  
If I can’t find my own, I want to search

the streets—spread throughout bodies
freely, a displacement of tons. I want to run

wildly across streets with animals before they hit
the cars, before they’re moved onto the solid white line

waiting for their pickup time.…

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It would be, I told
my mother, better though clueless
is, as smart people say, the only
truth in cancer. 

                                   Within the world
opposite us, smart people were leaving
Baghdad, war plans prepared.

A port appeared
beneath her clavicle, fluid in tubes
though eyes turned to a top general
fingering before smart people a vial meant
to worry nations. 

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Stevie Z Fischer writes about “the dynamics of people, nature, and power in small-town New England.” Her first novel, River Rules, looks at “how everyday heroes can be forged as lives are changed by forces seemingly beyond our control.” Outside of that, she teaches at several universities. You can find her here.

In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Fischer about River Rules, her interests in environmentalism and social connections, the pros and cons of modern political correctness, and more!

– Stevie Z. Fischer


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