Issue 80
A sneak peek into the new issue with Richard Jacobs, Hania Qutub, Mary Alice Dixon, and Robbie Gamble.
TRANSCRIPT
Passager has been cranking out issues of its journal since 1990. And we just published Issue 80! As is our habit, when a new issue comes out, we feature a few pieces from it here on Burning Bright.
Richard Jacobs said that he’s always been interested in fiction that examines the dynamics of father and son relationships, especially those of aging fathers and their middle-aged sons. Here’s an excerpt from Richard’s story “Dandelions.”
Dad …looked at me and said, “Now, I want you to stay here, please. … “I’ll explain later. And if I fall and can’t get up on my own power, I’ll call out for you. Okay?
…I obeyed him until he’d been out of sight for a minute, then trailed his scuffs in the dirt until I heard a series of scrapes. I ducked behind a hemlock tree at a distance just close enough for me to see that my dad was sitting with his legs outspread over two raised roots of a sweet gum tree. Leaning forward, both hands around the handle of a trowel, he was gouging away at the crust of ground between the roots. The spot at which he scraped was ridden with stones and seemed loath to submit to his blade, but he kept at it, indomitable as a man out of a Faulkner novel, not pausing, not slowing down, not even panting. Shame at spying on him, for risking intrusion on his private ceremony, assailed me but I remained on guard behind the hemlock branches. For what if my father broke his ankle or hip when he tried to rise or had a stroke or was chanced upon by others? And what the hell was he attempting to dredge out of the rock-ribbed earth?
An excerpt of Richard Jacobs’s story “Dandelions.”
Palestinian American Hania Qutub said she wrote this next poem to express a suffocating caused by watching the violence directed at her people, that it reopened traumatic memories of violence she witnessed many times as a child. She said, “The only power left for us remains our words, if others will hear them. We like to think that as we grow older and the passions of youth wane, the world too will calm down and be a better place. To see cruelty is difficult especially when directed at the vulnerable.” Here’s Hania Qutub’s poem “You Ask Me.”
You ask me to read my poem
And I say,
“I can’t”
For to read to you has certain rules
There is an etiquette
that we agreed upon
that my words full of furious feelings
will be delivered politely
Without crying
Without convulsing
Or collapsing
Or contorting my face as I try to avoid both
To do that requires a space
between my words and myself
A space that does not exist
A space that cannot exist
because separation from my words is loss
And I have loss
I am standing in the tempest of Loss
Of my land and my people
Of my past and my present
Its inferno clutches me
And there is no space
There are only
Words
“You Ask Me.” Hania Qutub.
Next, a piece from Mary Alice Dixon’s memoir “My Lopsided Hips, Curvy Spine, and Hunger for Hoss Cartwright.”
1965
I’m fourteen when I fall in love. Hungry for a fellow with the widest hips I’ve ever seen – Hoss Cartwright. When Hoss gallops into the black-and-white RCA Victor TV in our family’s pine paneled den I find my first soul mate. That Cartwright boy rides so fine I think our TV might shake out of its vinyl-clad console. It doesn’t. But I shake with an appetite I never knew I had. I know nothing of men – or women. But I know an ample ass when I see one. And Hoss? Well, that fellow has one ample ass. His hunky lopsided hips sing to me. Also his belt-defying belly. Fat? No way. Hoss is a well-built windbreak. Even his real name, Dan Blocker, sounds sturdy. Like a sequoia that would protect you in a storm. But I don’t just love Hoss. I want to be him. Hats, hips, horses, and all. When I see Hoss mount Chub, a dark horse with a crooked streak of white hair, I learn, for me, symmetry isn’t sexy. I discover you don’t have to be perfectly straight to be beautiful. Or strong.
1972
Dan Blocker dies, May 1972. He is forty-three. Blood clot following gall bladder surgery. I’m in college. Active in women’s liberation, studying Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Shakespeare’s Richard III. When I hear of Dan Blocker’s death, I mourn. Mourn Hoss. Mourn Dan Blocker. I haunt the campus woods, stop going to class for a time. I repurpose my felt fedora into a wide-brimmed cowhand hat. I wear tight bellbottoms that show the curves of my hips.
That from Mary Alice Dixon’s memoir “My Lopsided Hips, Curvy Spine, and Hunger for Hoss Cartwright.”
Robbie Gamble said he was privy to a remarkable phone conversation not
too long ago, and out of it came “Chloe Calls from College.”
A quick before-breakfast check-in: Ma,
I just wanted you to know that I inherited
your goat-hair gene, I saw one sprouting
from my chin this morning, and I had to
pluck it. Thanks a lot. And you know she’s
more amused than miffed, and she’s not
spilling ironic gratitude for a chromosomal
glitch, instead she’s dropping a sidewise kudo
for the jangled heartaches, the shrapnel
from the divorce, all your pre-dawn frets
and navigational nudges that helped her arrive
on this wondrous, slightly scary plateau.
She has her tweezers and a kick-ass Mom,
and for now she is kvetching on solid ground.
“Chloe Calls from College,” Robbie Gamble.
We’ve been listening to pieces from Passager’s newest, hot-off-the-presses journal issue. We’ll include more from Issue 80 on future issues of Burning Bright.
Several writers from Issue 80 will be reading their work at a Zoom Reading on Sunday, March 29. To register, visit our website.
To subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
