I roll the last three peaches beneath my hands, testing them for water. Watercolor fuzz tickles, curls away beneath the paring knife. Here
I find the peach pit clinging like an unready soul to its flesh, wishing to bring along riches stored in fibers.
There is another, floating free within its body. A curve of steel reaches the center and the pit rolls out, cordial and without complaint. It is ready.
My hand curls around the very last, blade easing through softness. My fingers find— when the fruit is cut away—a third stone cleaved in two. I think it saw the world from within its cocoon.
William Frank and DW Stojek are the authors of nearly 10 books of poetry between them, and they’ve been creative partners and performers (at readings and presentations around New York City) for over twenty-five years. When not writing poetry, Stojek is an avid photographer, while Frank enjoys long hours of chess, bingeing on 1950’s Japanese Cinema, taking naps with Scrambles (his cat), arguing with the Devil, press-ganging the elderly and Sadism.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Frank and Stojek about their collections (The Purgatory Elm and The Foreign Excellent Rainbow Company, Inc. 1920, respectively), as well as popular culture, outrage culture, being tongue-in-cheek about poetry, and much more!
from the patio, my body twinges, your hands pressed to the glass of the sliding door, our marriage much like this when you see the minor injury that will take me many weeks to overcome, the irritation more than the pain, and I see it in your eyes, the injury that will take us away from ourselves, the way the glass door keeps us apart, the way the leaves are drained from the wheelbarrow into the empty field not far enough from the house to stop the wind from spilling them back into our lives like the tissue that grows, both ornamental and necessary, over wounds.
I hate the savanna. That’s somewhat of a strange statement, since the savanna provides me with a very good living, and anyone I know turns green with envy when I tell them that I’m a wildlife cameraman, but for me the savanna has become the place that I’m stuck in. I cannot move ahead, and I cannot get out of it. I just lie down in ambush with my cameras and their huge lenses and get bitten by mosquitos.
Last week I got a contract for documenting the lives of two lion cubs which were born here. They don’t really have names, but the director of the film, who never actually bothers to travel all the way to Africa, calls them Roarago and Roaragi.… ...continue reading
Jendi Reiter, vice president of Winning Writers (named one of the “101 Best Websites for Writers” by Writer’s Digest, 2015-2018), oversees the Winning Writers literary contests. The website, founded in 2001 to help poets and writers, is located in Western Massachusetts. Jendi is also an award-winning author with a new book of short stories, An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2018).
How long did it take to organize the help so many poets and writers depend upon in Winning Writers? What was the spark that started it?
WW is always evolving and refining our features, which include a monthly e-newsletter, four writing awards, and a database of the Best Free Literary Contests.
Few people
understand passion, either their own or that of others. This incomprehension
occurs even between two people who care for each other, indeed, who may care
for each other very much. I did not understand Ariela’s passion when I should
have. Enlightenment came to me on a bus ride from Beersheba to Jerusalem, over
five thousand miles from home, and forty-five years too late to do anything
about it. It arrived as a gestalt does, not changing the details of what is
seen but rather how one sees them.
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Last
summer I visited my granddaughter who was attending a religious school in the
Old City of Jerusalem. Friday evening we ate at the home of one of her
classmates. During dinner there was the usual conversation, where are you from,
where did you go to school, do you happen to know so-and-so.… ...continue reading
The sirens scream, and I am drowned by Los Angeles memories— a flood of people hunters, prowling rapists, drive-by babies bleeding in cradles, kids hop-scotching Hollywood stars, barbed-wire high schools with penitentiary views, mothers sleeping under overpasses, drinking freeway smog while the night halo rises. I sink down below into the pass, the canyon, the valley, as tumbleweeds snag on marooned car hulls and bonfire piers are whipped by Devil Winds. There is no river here, I remind myself, no reason to fear cavitation, no crossing boatman, only a cemented trickle tattooed by graffiti bridges, turbines stealing snowmelt, pushing it over snared bodies. Only time locks dribbling out showers, dams anchoring drinking fountains. The Queen of the Angels may mourn the Tujunga watershed and Santa Ana sucker, but I fear a storm on the mountain, drowning in a shimmering current backwater that screams my name.… ...continue reading
