Creative Spiral by Alexis Findarle |
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by Jane Blue My mother built things in her spare time. She could have been an architect but she was a writer. In 1954 she flew to Japan, the only woman on the junket. My lanky, mannish mother. On Waikiki for refueling a man took a glamor shot of her in a two-piece batik bathing suit, pale journalist’s skin, cat-eye glasses. She looks like she needs a cigarette. In Tokyo she stayed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel. Carbons sent back to San Francisco read “fabulous.” Carved pilasters of black lava stone, cantilevered terraces. He was known for his prairie houses, clean roof lines, repressed chimneys. Suppressed grief written all over my mother’s face on Waikiki. Earlier in the century the architect opened an office in Japan. At home his studio overlooking a pond in Wisconsin burned and savaged, the arsonist hatcheted Wright’s lover and her children to death. His life always hung in a balance between renown and tragedy. Everyone’s life hangs in some kind of balance. The Imperial Hotel stood after the legendary earthquake of 1923, phoenix in the razed city, swaying on its floating foundations. In the carbons my mother interviews Tonao Senda, 35, so lately the enemy: “I looked up and I could see the B-29. The firelight was shining on the underside of its wings. It was beautiful,” he said. Paragraph: “Tonao Senda did not love the Americans.” The Imperial Hotel was demolished in 1968, as was my father. After two weeks in Japan my mother, reinforced steel, went on to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka and home. |
Trinity by Francis DiClemente |
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by Patricia Hickerson little Grandma my bones cry out to you the dark deserted morning after a night of cards he threw his keys on the bureau swayed against the bed the window glass icy snow in the gutters trees leafless road a blank your small figure neat and cold a cotton nightgown whited out your dream of love those you could have married the one you married your second cousin from Alsace the one you thought you’d be safe with he threw his keys on the bureau said you and the boy will be better off without me your old bones my bones lose their grip on the chairback fall sidewise La de La d’oo drool into the satin pillow forget a century ago |
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by Lisa Anne Jones Rugged pine reaching out of moonscape granite. How do you make a life of rock and air? Maybe we are all wild seed, manicured into bonsai and boxwood. We think ourselves houses, heavy on the ground, capable of shutting out the weather. Meanwhile wild winds push a thought no one wants to hear, their whispers a tenacious vine reaching through the wood of windows, busting them open, until it's all vine. Like a strangler fig on a palm tree, saying over and over open your eyes, see me, see where my skin turns into you. |
Photograph by Danyce Thole |
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Connecticut by Ocean Vuong How do I explain to the small boy beside me the difference between flowers and humans? That these seeds will crack and sprout the same way they do in his bright pictures. That we are not pictures. That something infected with the variability of life will bear the flawless reflections of beauty each time the leaves expand to collect the heat we leave behind. That each pod contains instructions to dance in the wind and possess the petals that stroke our breaths. This is why we plant them to remind us of perfection. That to press a finger into soil, we are not too far away. I want to tell him it is October. In four weeks when his face lights the window to hope for their height they will have frozen before the bloom. And he will have to live without knowing which color ached in their stems. |
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