Winter 2013: Poetry
The Old Life
by Andrea Hollander
How almost easy it was to live even with disappointment. If a boy didn’t phone or if he did and his voice was filled with obligation, unmistakable as the residue of flour left on my mother’s breadboard, I could bear it. And when suddenly only other girls’ bodies changed their lives the way Cinderella’s fairy godmother transformed hers, though longing and envy entered my own life, still it wasn’t so difficult to be patient. Downstairs in my mother’s kitchen I could count on the yeasty smell of dough and my mother’s experience in boy things. Or there were dishes to do, a floor to be swept, the pleasant necessity of usefulness. If that didn’t help, I could enter my father’s oak-lined study with its many books and their soundless wisdom I believed echoed my father’s voice and his leather chair that echoed the shape of his body. Sometimes I would sit there in the quiet of that room as though I were already a woman, wise and on my own, someone experienced, who knew how to dole out the particulars of justice to imaginary children without altering my day’s routine. How much better my new life would be, how finally complete and comfortable and on the other side of complication.
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Enjoy the richness: thirteen poets, nineteen poems, and a diversity of style and craft. |
Three memoirists share their emotional truths in these slices-of-life. |
Our featured artist, as well as painters and photographers, provide colorful visions that will leave you seeing the world in new ways. |
Three emerging writers share talent and creativity far beyond their years. |
Learn more about the contributors who make us proud of our Winter 2013 edition. |
