I’m oddly comforted by the photo of Jonathan Lethem that adorns the rear flap of his latest short story collection, Lucky Alan. Gone is the ultra-hip young author who stared almost defiantly at me from the flap of The Fortress of Solitude. Could I ever be as sharp as that guy? As astute? As literary? As Brooklyn cool?
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David Mason’s fifth book of poetry, Sea Salt, explores the ineffable degradation of the surface while the internal core remains intact. The poems use “salt” as an over-riding metaphor to define a world that is slowly being eaten away by time and the elements. The lines in most every poem within this volume are plain-spoken, clear, rhythmically assured and cut to weigh against each other. The voice is confident and employs vivid metaphor to express regret, loss, and joy. Poetry, after time and the elements do their bidding, is what remains.
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1. It’s beautiful out, like really beautiful. Not the way they’re used to, sunsets and sunrises, or even the bright clarity after rain. It’s more of a golden beauty, halfway through an eclipse beauty, halfway through a wildfire beauty.
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There were five of them: Moondash, Starlight, Angel, Sunny, and Comet. Together they lived in the Cloudy Kingdom, a pillowy realm in the sky, and had all sorts of adventures.
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Zain Khalid Dear guy, I get it. I’m Arab and, equally unfortunately, Arab-looking. I hadn’t shaved and was sweating a
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I see centipedes, or I think I do, out of the corner of my eye when I’m in the basement I lately call home. I catch a shadow on the floor, and my eyes dart into every patch of darkness, every lifeless piece of clothing strewn about. While brushing my teeth, I am distracted by a nail hole in the wall. I am drawing with eyeliner and glance up and there—there. A live one. A couple inches long with flamboyant feelers barely distinguishable from its hair-thin legs. You could comb those legs. Curl those legs. Run your fingers down and through and caress those legs.
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Jerry had been dragging around his dead wife for a week. Movies. Grocery Store. The park. The Sanford’s Halloween party, as a drunken zombie. People laughed at first, but when Hank Sanford saw the tip of a pinky finger drop like a cherry tomato onto his couch, he asked them to leave.
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Paying up on the booth had meant not paying her house rent, which she’d believed acceptable until the landlord evicted her. Now Marsha was sleeping in the booth, on her merchandise. The iron bed frame with its thin, bounceless mattress had been an acquisition from a nursing home basement in Gary, Indiana; only the pillow was actually hers. The rest of her personal items were in the antique store employee bathroom, tucked into a medium-sized rolling luggage bag.
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Cauliflower perches behind your ear and talks to you in a tinny voice. Time to walk the dog, it says. You put the emerald collar on the white Pomeranian. Fluffy’s always smiling, no matter what. His paws click on the black and white squares. You wrap yourself in your evening capelet, silk and egret feathers. Cauliflower tells you it’s a one-of-a-kind Coco Chanel.
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