PARIS by Elly Bookman – FOUR WAY REVIEW
At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible palms around a rosary. Soon I’d learn to drive a manual transmission, the backward N of the asc…| FOUR WAY REVIEW
POETRY FLEVATO by Richard Siken PARIS by Elly Bookman THE BABIES by Dara Yen Elerath YESTERDAY AUSTIN TOLD ME TWO SWANS by Arro Mandell PASSTHROUGH by Haley Lee GOLD by Kunjana Parashar BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary THE YEAR YOU DIED by Vasvi Kejriwal TWO POEMS by Alexa Luborsky TWO POEMS by Caroline Richards TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl FICTION RUN| FOUR WAY REVIEW
I am watching the babies. The gray one in sticky pants who keeps picking his nose. The pale one with headlice, scabies and fleas. I am watching the babies. This one choking on a plastic bottle. This one talking to itself in the dark. I am hauling the babies to the park, to the library,| FOUR WAY REVIEW
drowned a local man for coming too close and Thomas and I laughed but I still think if I don’t count my teeth they’ll be taken, can’t be careful enough out here. Last night I stepped onto a stage heaped with dead fish. I was looking for the right earrings| FOUR WAY REVIEW
After the play we talk while we wait for the C with our shoes touching on the platform. Say, when the magician unrolled the sea, an old tunnel in us burst open. Lights off, all air – with you I believe in water wrung from paper. They didn’t need to use names to make us| FOUR WAY REVIEW
Lately, I’ve been yearning for things: car keys, houseplants, dhurries, cubes of ice, petals, but really for something skin-deep. I keep addressing myself as we; like I am the bull & I am the matador. I am the prayer and the devotee. We are prying open our mouths to sing. We are the ear and| FOUR WAY REVIEW
It’s 9:31 PM where the end of the city tinges the sea. An empty spiderweb hangs motionless between the blinds & the closed window leaking the street’s neon onto the unmade bed. No moon. Not even the comfort of wine, bottles shaped like the body I want, & will never have.| FOUR WAY REVIEW
05/19: A tornado flung a fridge into the bones of a tree. Its bark, gnarled, like the mouth of someone, new to grief. 05/22: I found your pen at the edge of the dresser. Yet to collect dust, it held your fading fingermarks. 06/18: Then, hunger| FOUR WAY REVIEW
Recovery poem with jargon After reading Auden, I water my moth orchid with ice cubes and watch a girl with green hair draw a benzene ring in white erase. I pay attention to time. I arrange my table of books into heiroglyphs and try to say something before the sun sets. In Midsummer Night’s| FOUR WAY REVIEW
from Scenes from the Seconds It was written for an exhibition that at the end of her life Louise Bourgeois circled back to her birth1 When I did as asked like long hair I pulled my fire back 1Unknown *** Henceforth and forever I am my own| FOUR WAY REVIEW
At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible palms around a rosary. Soon I’d learn to drive a manual transmission, the backward N of the asc…| FOUR WAY REVIEW
I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer, to anything like the same degree. (Edward Said referred to his “pained admiration,” and dissonant phrases of that kind are scattered through appreciations of his work.) I know, too, that you knew him, which I did not. I don’t know if that makes him more or less difficult to appraise.| n+1
