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
Poetry II A constant, low thump is overhead – Patrol chopper, Army chopper, News chopper, Chopping: conveyor belt sushi with sparklers, dulling the appetite like the smell of sulfur singed skin and a stomach that knows best. The outline comes into view about noon, an Oz already conquered. The front wheels plunk off the causeway, falling from a star like a miracle. (Claps from the back seat.) Camouflage Humvees zipper the caked highway, barely visible among the sound walls – layered like Hiroshima sunsets into early '46. All fifty thousand, in front and behind, a simmering iridescence in the surrounding grays and browns. We roll through yet unblemished layers of the sunbaked silt – the fresh crunch of that chance path 36
Poetry II signaling Christmas Morning Bubble Wrap Explosions. Something Primitive in the satisfaction. The motion begins a slalom through an obstacle course of equally gray-brown and once properly placed objects: overturned vehicles of every necessity and leisure, refrigerators laid on side – flayed, open, exposed, insides tumbling out – square soot-covered seppuku carcasses. In the lethargic heat of this summer afternoon, the ‘Xs’ hang heavy on every exhausted exterior, sagging with Search-and-Rescue Codes too numerous to count. And like those scraping through the remnants in mid-August ’45, flipping pieces of pocked concrete clinging to sheared rebar – a certainty of security in the future lost from only moments ago – we confirm, against all callus and craving, there is no reason to return. 37
- Page 3 and 4: Table of Contents Editors' Note iii
- Page 5 and 6: Editors' Note "When I found out abo
- Page 7 and 8: Prose Abnormal Whites and Excessive
- Page 9 and 10: Prose strangling me and that all to
- Page 11 and 12: Prose to thrive and live in your mo
- Page 13 and 14: Prose How is it possible for one to
- Page 15 and 16: Prose “You are so lucky to have t
- Page 17 and 18: Prose With one last sigh for relief
- Page 19 and 20: Prose Grandma Jo Ann. Apart from th
- Page 21 and 22: Prose painful unraveling as the tab
- Page 23 and 24: Prose into someone you know — an
- Page 25 and 26: Short Fiction A Song for Mr. Solomo
- Page 27 and 28: Short Fiction of arm’s reach. The
- Page 29 and 30: Short Fiction For truce. Break. Sta
- Page 31 and 32: Poetry I Cannot conquer them all Bu
- Page 33 and 34: Poetry I Acquaintances we were - Lo
- Page 35 and 36: Poetry I Man’s honour. We were mo
- Page 37 and 38: THE LIT/PUB INTERVIEW King Bruno Pr
- Page 39 and 40: THE LIT/PUB INTERVIEW perception of
- Page 41: Poetry II We turn left out of the d
- Page 45 and 46: Memoir Tampa to Pensacola, where we
- Page 47 and 48: Memoir lived in a residential neigh
- Page 49 and 50: Travel Solo Trip By Emily Chao I’
- Page 51 and 52: Travel of the tours I’ve been on.
Poetry II<br />
signaling<br />
Christmas Morning Bubble Wrap<br />
Explosions.<br />
Something Primitive<br />
in the satisfaction.<br />
The motion begins a slalom through an<br />
obstacle course of equally gray-brown and<br />
once properly placed objects: overturned<br />
vehicles of every necessity and leisure,<br />
refrigerators laid on side – flayed,<br />
open, exposed, insides tumbling out<br />
– square soot-covered seppuku<br />
carcasses.<br />
In the lethargic heat of this summer afternoon,<br />
the ‘Xs’ hang heavy<br />
on every exhausted exterior, sagging<br />
with Search-and-Rescue Codes too<br />
numerous to count. And like those<br />
scraping through the remnants in<br />
mid-August ’45, flipping<br />
pieces of pocked concrete clinging<br />
to sheared rebar –<br />
a certainty of security in the future<br />
lost from only moments ago –<br />
we confirm, against all callus and<br />
craving, there is no reason to return.<br />
37
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