New World Writing Quarterly

“What do you want?” Jeff said, his voice sound­ing above, from inside the thir­ty-foot-tall slide tow­er.  Eddie stood on the grass just out­side the play­ground floor, which was cov­ered in mulch. “I’ve dis­cov­ered unopened –more

The pas­tor scrubs her rash. It’s been spread­ing. There’s red under every crook of her. Something in the cas­sock, she thinks. Dry clean it.

She’s in the church house show­er, peek­ing out an eye lev­el win­dow that’s open an inch and vent­ing steam. –more

We don’t know why the nurse who worked in a large urban hos­pi­tal only trav­eled to coun­tries with lousy san­i­ta­tion, pol­lut­ed water and too many peo­ple. She nev­er pro­tect­ed her­self against life-threat­en­ing dis­eases, so when she got sick no one was –more

The dead have their own prob­lems, unable to sep­a­rate one day from anoth­er, call­ing out to some­one who might remem­ber them in anoth­er room, wav­ing a phan­tom arm in greet­ing. I see beyond them. I am hur­ry­ing to the dance hall, with its speck­led bird –more

Intro to Poetry

We find it an awful thing to meet peo­ple
seri­ous or not, who have turned into vacant
effec­tive peo­ple… —William Stafford, “Introduction to Literature”

Look: poet­ry is –more

I was 28, and my age is very rel­e­vant to this story.

I had start­ed a rela­tion­ship a few months ear­li­er. It was fun, and it was shiny. I was fulfilled.

I was drink­ing cof­fee, just out­side of Harvard Square. A young man ran by. –more

The Night Before Halloween

Someone left a brand-new plas­tic tiara, secured inside its flim­sy box, perched on the cement bar­ri­er by a gas pump at the BP sta­tion on D Avenue. Someone scooped it from the oily pave­ment before a tire crushed it, placed –more

Book review and inter­view with Rebe Huntman about My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle

Rebe Huntman has been on a journey—an out­er one and an inner one. Through My Mother in Havana, we get to join her.

A seem­ing­ly –more

Due to unfore­seen dif­fi­cul­ties with the prepa­ra­tion and pub­li­ca­tion of the January issue of NWWQ the issue will not be pub­lished at this time. We hope to resume pub­li­ca­tion on our reg­u­lar sched­ule in April.

The Editors

October 2024 sub­mis­sions close 10/14/24. We will next accept sub­mis­sions January 1–14, 2025. We do not accept sub­mis­sions between issues. Thanks to all who sub­mit­ted to this issue and spe­cial thanks to our Senior edi­tors Kim Chinquee and Elizabeth Wagner for select­ing much of the work in this issue.

Will Pfefferle is a writer and musi­cian who has pho­to-doc­u­ment­ed all the coun­ties in var­i­ous Western states. Herewith a link to his pho­to-doc­u­men­tary of the 16 coun­ties in Nevada, with (we hope) more to come.

Let me tell you, it helps to keel over unex­pect­ed­ly when in your mid-50s on a sun­ny morn­ing in June. Catch every­body by sur­prise–“Aurora? God, no!” But while folks are stunned, hushed and grace­ful in pay­ing –more

The bar was just off the frontage road, out front of the dog track and next door to a dive motel. It was a cin­der-block build­ing that struck any­one who saw it as that rare exam­ple of archi­tec­tur­al intent: the above-ground –more

I remem­ber search­ing for the near­est trash bin in the Whole Foods park­ing garage, wor­ry­ing that the over­priced kom­bucha might come back up on my bleach-stained leg­gings and rat­ty sweat­shirt. His room­mate looked the same, tall, –more

Finally, after a full year of col­lege on cam­pus his junior year, Gerald came home to find out that his par­ents secured him a job work­ing for his uncle Leo, a wealthy man who’d oper­at­ed a small engine repair shop for thir­ty years—Gerald’s –more

     It is noth­ing to me who runs the Dive.
     Let’s have a look at anoth­er five.
           –Robert Frost in Dive’s Dive

My grand­ma taught me.
She wasn’t some namby-pamby
who’d let her grand­son win
to build his self-esteem.

Nah. She took my allowance
and my lunch money
and had me out on my bike
deliv­er­ing the Daily News.

She showed me how to mix
and deal—from the top, bottom
and mid­dle, like a card sharp
on a Mississippi pad­dle boat.

She taught me position,
the ratio of pot to bet,
and had me calculate
the odds of a draw on the fly.

Nana let me watch her games
to teach me tells—
catch when six fin­ger Johnny taps his toes
and black-eyed Susan rubs her nose.

She taught me to look a stranger straight in the eye
and lie. Convince him my five cards,
good only to mark a place in books,
was at least a high straight.

Grandma kept the mon­ey she won
from me for in a glass pick­le jar.
I always thought I’d get it back—
but not a nickel.
~
Steve Deutsch is poet­ry edi­tor of Centered Magazine and was the first poet in res­i­dence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nom­i­nat­ed three times for the Pushcart Prize and once for The Best of the Net Anthology. He has pub­lished six books of poet­ry. One, Brooklyn, was award­ed the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press.

IT’S ONLY A QUEEN-SIZED BED

It’s only a queen-sized bed and I’m sleep­ing on the right-hand ledge because you broke your wrist when you fell with your arm out­stretched on the con­crete skirt of our neighbor’s pool and it rests in a splint on a pile of pil­lows with Felix the cat between our legs and I can nev­er tell whether he’s sleep­ing above or below the blan­kets. As usu­al, I’m half-awake think­ing of Proust and Bolaño, how detailed time pass­es slow­ly at the din­ner table of the first and in the sci­ence fic­tion of the sec­ond. I met Bolaño through his books because he seems to be a brain sur­geon of a cer­tain type. On a fine day in Spring, when I was read­ing In the Spirit of Science Fiction, his ear­li­est book about poets, that is to say almost any of his books, I ran across his descrip­tion of an epi­dem­ic of com­pul­sive wood­work­ing break out in an African vil­lage. He reports how all of the wood­work­ers unex­pect­ed­ly die as if their hob­by had incit­ed a virus of vio­lence and this made me think of Bolaño’s lit­er­ary oppo­site, how Proust doesn’t make pre­dic­tions about the future but wrote about the lived past, how it takes me the same amount of time to read about a din­ner in his nov­el as it took the real Marcel to attend the actu­al event. There’s no real sense of time pass­ing in Bolaño and no idea of who is speak­ing. In Science Fiction the per­son­al let­ters ascribed to Jan, a main char­ac­ter in the book, go undat­ed and I’ve nev­er heard of any of his poets, real or imag­ined, how­ev­er I do like the idea of how they proud­ly set a Mexican record of sorts for the great­est num­ber of hard­scrab­ble poet­ry mag­a­zines pub­lished in any giv­en month or year. Bolaño’s fic­tion­al poets live in pover­ty like most poets do who don’t have aca­d­e­m­ic teach­ing posi­tions but not a sin­gle exam­ple of their poems is quot­ed. A few pages on, Jan tells a Marcel-type Narrator about a young writer who report­ed­ly ate a good por­tion of Remembrance of Things Past while try­ing to stave off star­va­tion dur­ing the siege of Sevastopol in 1942. At that moment I felt as if Bolaño had read my mind with his own unre­al­i­ty since some­one some­where has prob­a­bly made a lit­er­al meal of Proust. The two writ­ers are like a hall of mir­rors in which plea­sure arrives with a headache. Proust real­ly loved that “lit­tle yel­low patch of wall” in Vermeer’s View of Delft, which can’t be found in the actu­al paint­ing though Proust invents such an odor of real­i­ty that his View of Delft occu­pies my head wear­ing the patch. Being quar­an­tined dur­ing Covid at home seemed like a good time to write a poem about Bolaño in which time explodes into noth­ing and the com­pul­sive wood­work­ers in the Congo are long gone, many bronze stat­ues of King Leopold hav­ing been melt­ed down. Like oth­er pre­vi­ous efforts of mine, a Bolaño poem turned me toward Proust instead.

~

JERSEY GIRLS

What do you want to know and what can I tell you?
You could mar­ry either one and be done with it—
flat con­so­nants and bro­ken vow­els gone with time.
Tonight’s the first date in a year or two both sis­ters sit
across from me at Liz’s Café on Bradford Street
the younger by twen­ty-four months tall and thin
with a face out of Modigliani, the old­er one shorter
by a head bright as a Russian doll Picasso stacked.
They have beat­en with charm every clock but the one
we will all lose to includ­ing tonight’s menu held
by a gay hand hav­ing land­ed in the prov­i­dent world
of Provincetown and the near­by infant at the next table
who can’t read this text. Long ago the Jersey girls
turned their backs to the con­so­nants of the highway
they were born to before hunt­ing down the men
who would share their beds for a life­time helplessly
caught by beau­ty and sense. Like tourists they rode
the dunes in morn­ing bug­gies and watched for whales
in the after­noon. You could feel their ener­gy in the jokes
they told bleed­ing the air away in giant bal­loons Adam
paint­ed over the years and what­ev­er the writer wrote.
You could nev­er tell what the girls were laugh­ing about
in their sev­enth decade by shar­ing child­hood secrets
back and forth at this table dec­o­rat­ed with the broth
of three gen­er­a­tions, the eldest of irre­place­able sense
and beau­ty must be filmed before no one remembers
the last Hollywood stars they fed on like sharks
blow­ing kiss­es with aer­at­ed hair and lips paint­ed red.

~

TIME & PLACE

You can’t go back
You’ve changed and the place has changed
The iodine smell of the ocean
And the vanil­la of your ice cream
Have gone with age
And the board­walk of youth.
Perhaps no one knew how it happened
Not one of the loves that has touched you
Or made you
Could warn you
Not when they were here to tuck you in
Not one could imag­ine the change
In themselves
While read­ing fairy tales in Little Golden Books
Or drop­ping the nee­dle on a long-play­ing record.
Not as they drove their two-toned Bel Air
Where you sat with­out a safe­ty belt
In white and aquamarine
And the carousel on Coney Island
Seemed just ahead
As the sun began to set.
They didn’t know how the end was anoth­er time
So near, so final.

~

TO YOU WHO ARE STILL MARRIED

I’ve done it and I don’t know how—
per­haps you can tell me what I missed
doing it by habit or instinct.

Fifty years have passed with­out reason
the two of us bare­ly compatible
in ways big and small.

We start­ed as a pair of green vegetables
put in a freez­er at peak season.
Of late we wrin­kle at the same rate

though I will nev­er see it in her face,
the refrac­tive index of my eyes changing
fast enough to stop time.

Perhaps we’re twins who speak in stereo
faster than either one can breathe,
pow­ered by opin­ions on everything.

I guess we shared a love for enormity,
of space and art, of nat­ur­al adventure,
of the brain at rest in the heart forever.

~

ENTRE NOUS

Forty years have passed after only one of us had felt
the prosce­ni­um of life between your legs
that British nous for a com­mon sense we couldn’t share
that secret knowl­edge of prac­ti­cal intelligence
and pain, even in con­fi­dence, the phi­los­o­phy of mind
and intel­lect only a woman can bear
if time has slowed so you could touch the near­est star.

A street away I closed a patient’s head
before rush­ing to your side and some ordi­nary hours
you suf­fered in sweat but can’t remember
how you were dressed or why your injec­tion failed.
Wheeling you into Delivery with haste
I saw a doc­tor use a glove he’d dropped to the floor.
Entre nous, love and a boy and ener­gy enough to rest.

~

MICHAEL SALCMAN: for­mer chair­man of neu­ro­surgery, University of Maryland and pres­i­dent of The Contemporary Museum, a child of the Holocaust and a sur­vivor of polio. Poems in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Raritan and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti (nom­i­nat­ed for The Poets’ Prize), The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary poems on med­i­cine, A Prague Spring (Sinclair Poetry Prize win­ner), Shades & Graces (win­ner Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize), Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022) and Crossing the Tape (2024).

I’m sor­ry if this poem hurts
and here is a piece of ster­ile gauze

to bite down on
if it caus­es pain.

You say, by email, that Miriam’s son
came through his surgery fine

though there were a few hours after that
his pain meds did not kick in.

He’s in a hos­pi­tal, in Israel.
It’s ear­ly November, 2023.

He’s had repair for Crohn’s.
I sym­pa­thize. I say, that’s hard.

And I mean this. And yet I also know
that 75 miles away from him

the hos­pi­tals in Gaza
have run out of morphine

and they’re amputating
children’s arms and legs with only

ster­ile gauze for them to bite down on.
Is one pain worse? Or are they equal?

You say you can­not think of this.
You’re all numbed up. It’s exhausting.

And it’s war. What can I tell us both
about imag­i­na­tion, or empathy,

when the dis­tance between you
and them is 75 miles

and the dis­tance between you
and me is sev­er­al thousand?

When I’m just sit­ting here, trapped,
by ancient laws of geometry

and death? I can say this: triangulation
brings some clar­i­ty. Maybe the distance

just makes the tip
of the tri­an­gle sharper.

It becomes a needle.
Oh, I’m feel­ing it. You’re on the duller end,

but, Nomi, I know you’re feeling
oth­er sharp tips too,

tri­an­gu­lat­ed out from long
ago, and far away. Farther than October 7,

far­ther than your sons in Gaza.
Echoes of pogroms,

Auschwitz. Yes, I know and see those
too. “I get your points.”

I know you feel them.
How is it we can see pain

bet­ter even, some­times, when it
comes from far away?

Is this referred pain? Or deferred?
Something of our own pain

sup­pressed, per­haps, kept in? Is this
all their pain, or is it mine?

I’ll tell you this: when I saw those
pro­test­ers, in the US Congress,

with their arms raised,
with their bloody hands

I thought of my daughter
and the text she sent to me

this sum­mer. It was a picture
of her bloody hands.

She wrote: “I like the sight
of my own blood.”

She knew that this would hurt me.
She was right. I could feel that cut.

She was will­ing to sac­ri­fice herself
to make me hurt. So vul­ner­a­ble. She is her own

small human shield to her own hurt.
She was so near (75 miles), and yet so far away,

I couldn’t reach her. Authorities, laws,
and social insti­tu­tions failed us.

There were walls, so many, that shut her in.
That shut me out. This was a breach. I could see then

how we’d lived so separately
for years, and side by side,

and I’d not known, or seen, her pain.
She is her own Gaza. And

I’d lived next door, in a cool­er country
with bet­ter options.

There were those walls
between us. You know,

they call what she has “bor­der­line.”
And here’s the truth too, Nomi:

I brought her pain.
I caused that, some of it.

I tell you, Nomi, this was not my intent
and some­thing else: I had big dreams for her.

For us. But I’m bad at boundaries.
Too many times I crossed her lines.

I occu­pied her right­ful space.
So is this why I think I understand

Gaza? The deaths of chil­dren? Pain?
Is this why I care? Nomi, you may have

imag­i­na­tion, insight, truth
to share with me.

I’m lis­ten­ing.
I’ll also try to “get your points.”

As for my par­al­lel, I know
you may not like, accept it.

For here’s anoth­er geo­met­ric truth:
par­al­lel lines will nev­er intersect.

They cir­cle the globe, the universe
end­less­ly, run­ning side by side.

Though I still believe that some­times lines
can cross, that inter­sec­tions can

bring under­stand­ing, light.
But I can­not shake the world

from off its axis, or time
from off its path

to bend these lines. Yet I
still I send mine out to you

with hope that somehow
we will meet, and find

that light. I’m reach­ing out
with all I have

to reach and touch
and try to give:

my bloody hands.

~

Ora Alcorn is the third wife of Peter Alcorn, lost in the Atlantic in 1953. She has pub­lished wide­ly in lit­er­ary mag­a­zines in print and online.

Spolia

What remains for me: your books, war
relics, and pho­to albums.

With your books, you were quiet.
Trawling their depths
for under­lined pas­sages, marginalia,
I found only the cold
Victorian inscrip­tion from your father:

Many of my sen­ti­ments are stat­ed herein.

The relics: a var­i­ome­ter plucked from a German fighter,
the face marked Steigt and Sinkt. The back is stamped
Dresden, from which protrude,
like arrows in St. Sebastian’s side,
two alu­minum tubes, one for each word.
Puffing one sends the white nee­dle dancing.

Another: the hub from the yoke
of a B‑17, gold Art-Decco inlay on black,
the ‘O’ in ‘BOEING’ with out­spread wings.

Of the dozens of photographs,
I begin with one: you and your squad
before L’Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel,
unknown to me as the iden­ti­ty of your grim
mates. Modeled after the arch that threads
the Colosseum and the Palatine, the original
com­posed of spo­lia, reused
frag­ments of oth­er buildings.

A col­umn from the arc bal­ances on your tilt­ed crush­er cap.
I fol­low its line upward to the loom­ing quadriga,
horse heads dis­solv­ing in the sky,
legs flat­tened against the chariot.

I look again, your body against the gray
of Paris, imag­in­ing the moment the shutter
clos­es, as you are turned in her direction,
think­ing of the Winged Victory of Samothrace

absent from her perch in the Louvre.
A muse­um without
its head­less goddess.

It was said that when she was returned
to her post atop the stairs, her marble
wings could be seen trembling.

~

Grandfather Knocks on the TV Screen as a Ghost in the Machine

Some morn­ings, crows congregated
in our back­yard, their haunting
iri­des­cence against the green
lawn and sharp annunciations

pierc­ing the walls of the house.
My moth­er, singing qui­et­ly to the tune
of Cops, always gave them a smiling
glare over the rim of her cof­fee mug,

Oh, there you are you
Bad boys, bad boys…

Years lat­er, this theme song played
in the drunk­en glow of the TV
as the name of your home­town appeared
on the screen and then,

the door of your boy­hood home
came into focus across the hood
of a police cruiser.
I turned and watched the blue light

spasm on the tar­nished brass
dis­em­bod­ied door knocker
rest­ing on my bookshelf,
bear­ing our surname —

giv­en to me after you died —
removed from your door,
the very same door on the TV screen,
fifty years earlier.

~

Ramblin’ Jim and Cow Having Eaten Up Canaletto

Jiří Kolář freed a cow
from a paint­ing with a scalpel,
put her out to pasture.

Her absence frames a famed
paint­ing of a Venice
canal by Canaletto.

Façades in shad­ow fill
her void­ed loins,
udder dark
with clus­tered gondolas.

A lone window
where the bridge of her nose was.
Ears now spread like an angel’s
wings perched on a parapet

against a blue sky. A resting
mast, occu­pies a front leg,
the X‑ray of a van­ished bone.

*

In a pho­to of my great-grandfather
and his trot­ter, Ramblin’ Jim,
the horse is in profile,
coat gleam­ing like wet ebony.

Jim’s Stygian shad­ow folded
into the fore­ground as if his image
had been cut from the dirt
of the Great Depression by Kolář’s blade,
hinged at the hooves,
and rotat­ed to the vertical —
my great-grand­fa­ther holding

the bri­dle of a paper horse
on the edge of an abyss.

~

The Hall of the Ambassadors — Distilled

O is for ever and for ever
round and windows
no God.

Ice over doors of the enemy,
fall under stars.

O praise, for ever.
O the tanks for ever,
nag with praise to God,
his wing on us, slam.

And there is no con. &
on the wind, our warlike
God over-endows.

And there is no con. &
on the way, in a trance,
flow ions in prose.

I remove all the effects
of these sentences,
from the Korán,—
I flee for refuge,
of the only¬

Niche left: —

By the ris­ing moon
she heweth him
with dark Heaven
and spread him
[in wicked piety],
there is no Deity
but ah!

*

The script is repeated.

~

The Inverted Parabolic Curve of a Dying Boy On a Dirt Bike

Willows carved in stone vie with winged skulls on gray-boned
slate. From the low light of the din­ing room, I watch
shad­ows flit and fold bleak faces into a cold
plate of scales. These ceme­tery wit­ness­es catch

sighs of muf­flers drift­ing past, bright below break-lights,
snow dyed red. Shy cherubs and long-toothed death’s‑head grins
dis­guise their joy as the cops read the boy last rites.
Now, I slow my stud­ies of the Sumerians,

aba­cus-beard­ed Assyrians and their dead
stares from the pages, moments ago the boy flashed
cal­lous­ness on his bike. Chased by cruis­er blues, dread

rose and a mail­box made him into a dying
flare that hit halfway up a tele­phone pole, dashed—
throes of death, brain swollen, four-stroke engine sighing.

~

Andrew McLellan holds an MFA in cre­ative writ­ing from Queens University of Charlotte. He was a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at both the University of Tennessee and UNC Charlotte where he taught archi­tec­tur­al stu­dio and history/theory sem­i­nars. His writ­ing and col­lages have been fea­tured in books and pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Collage and Architecture (Routledge, 2013), Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Ashgate, 2017), and the Journal of Architectural Education, 70:1 (March 2016). His poet­ry can be found in Temenos and MORIA.

My cousin Sid Morrow told me he’d wok­en up, just yes­ter­day, from a dream that showed him how to get into a triple-locked box with­out ever open­ing it. To con­vince me, Sid said that he’d bought a crate, locked it, tied rope –more