AUR LitPut III Spring 2023 - From Now To Then
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria. The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced). The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta. Rome, May 2023
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is
having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria.
The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced).
The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta.
Rome, May 2023
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Prose<br />
A Bit of Extra Fun<br />
By Delaida Rodriguez<br />
I am like my mother.<br />
I peer into those jade eyes I’ve stared into many times before, my whole life really, and the<br />
harrowing truth becomes clear.<br />
I force myself to break eye-contact and watch as crumbs of bread sprinkle down onto the<br />
white plate in front of me. The wooden table is decorated with floral carvings that match the small<br />
town café’s aesthetic. I pick at the bread of the uneaten sandwich: a cold structure of chicken, lettuce,<br />
and tomato. I prefer to focus on the pale raindrops of dough rather than the silent words that muffle<br />
past my mother’s lips.<br />
I drown out every word she utters, but I can still hear the honeyed voice that has displaced my<br />
own.<br />
It was not some immense moment that triggered my sudden realization. A truth that was<br />
masked for nineteen years. <strong>To</strong>day was a day of routine, a simple drive, the ringing of my cell phone,<br />
followed by a photo that flaunted my mother’s face. It was a blink—a sudden grasp in my heart—<br />
when I saw the truth concealed in the cosmic voids of my subconscious for so long.<br />
I crumble the remaining clumps of bread, and then I pick up a fry. I feel the salt grains between<br />
my thumb and index. I begin to pick it apart. I can’t help it, this urge to pull apart. Better this<br />
french fry than myself.<br />
My attention shifts from the remaining hill of fries to her margarita glass imprinted with the<br />
stain of her wine lipstick, to those jade eyes that I can’t help but look up to again and again. I want<br />
nothing more than to figure out how to shatter the inevitability of genetics. If it is genetics.<br />
6
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