Windward Review Vol. 20 (2022): Beginnings and Endings
"Beginnings and Endings" (2022) challenged South Texas writers and beyond to narrate structures of beginnings and ends. What results is a collection of poetry, prose, hybrid writing, and photography that haunts, embraces, and consoles all the same. Similar to past WR volumes, this collection defies easy elaboration - it contains diverse tones, languages, colors, and creative spaces. Creative pieces within the text builds upon others, allowing polyvocal narratives to interlock and defy the logic of 'beginning-middle-end'. By the end of this collection, you will neither sense nor crave the finality that a typical text brings. Instead, you will be inspired to learn and create beyond a narrative linear structure. Your reading and support is sincerely appreciated.
"Beginnings and Endings" (2022) challenged South Texas writers and beyond to narrate structures of beginnings and ends. What results is a collection of poetry, prose, hybrid writing, and photography that haunts, embraces, and consoles all the same. Similar to past WR volumes, this collection defies easy elaboration - it contains diverse tones, languages, colors, and creative spaces. Creative pieces within the text builds upon others, allowing polyvocal narratives to interlock and defy the logic of 'beginning-middle-end'. By the end of this collection, you will neither sense nor crave the finality that a typical text brings. Instead, you will be inspired to learn and create beyond a narrative linear structure. Your reading and support is sincerely appreciated.
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I st<strong>and</strong> by her feeling like a shabby trophy.<br />
Everybody is surprised that I am much older than I look, “you look too skinny<br />
to be a professor”, they tell me,<br />
And often these conversations end with them entreating me to eat more.<br />
I try to busy myself washing teacups <strong>and</strong> carrying biscuit trays...<br />
but when the monsoon rains made the ground muddy,<br />
I grew bored <strong>and</strong> disgusted <strong>and</strong> withdrew to the chair by the door next to the<br />
sanitizer.<br />
Love in the time of corona.<br />
Death in the time of corona.<br />
I grow exasperated watching people mindlessly trying to pump sanitizer out<br />
of a spray bottle, <strong>and</strong> I attempt to remedy it by spraying it onto the h<strong>and</strong>s of…<br />
guests? Funeral goers? Mourners? I’m not sure what the appropriate term is.<br />
This too would have been incomplete without the drunk uncle. The neighbor.<br />
Insisting on bearing the weight of sorrow.<br />
I wonder how often we’d visit now...<br />
now that you’re gone.<br />
I realize that as long as your gut lays buried in the backyard,<br />
you’re not entirely gone.<br />
But I doubt we’d visit your gut.<br />
My father appears more insensitive than ever.<br />
I wonder if that’s his way of grieving...<br />
Or had he too grown numb after all these years of grieving.<br />
He’s afraid of germs <strong>and</strong> I feel angry. He dem<strong>and</strong>s to ride back home<br />
Before the rain<br />
Before the evening prayer service<br />
I ask him to join us from the doorway as I enter <strong>and</strong> st<strong>and</strong> beside you;<br />
violating PHI Something Health Regulations.<br />
My peripheral vision affirms my father’s luminous raincoated presence<br />
looming by the doorway growing anxious by the minute as the hymns draw in<br />
crowds like moths to a lamp.<br />
I also wonder how we’d be,<br />
My brothers <strong>and</strong> I,<br />
When we meet after long years at funerals.<br />
I realize your generation has left... taking with it some others,<br />
Like my uncle,<br />
He had been 23.<br />
Younger than me.<br />
I wonder how today would’ve been had he been there,<br />
I’ve heard wonderful stories about him<br />
<strong>Beginnings</strong> X <strong>Endings</strong><br />
1<strong>20</strong>