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