The Hopkins Review最新文献

{"title":"Good Luck, Good Night","authors":"T. J. Benson","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911583","url":null,"abstract":"Good Luck, Good Night T. J. Benson (bio) It begins with giant slices of pizza at Ristorante Pizza Luzzi, then selfies with naked medieval stone men and lots and lots of white wine. This was not what they had been brought here to do, but aah, they deserve this; it cost too much to come here, after those months when everyone believed the world had come to an end. They wonder at the buildings, make Instagram videos of the two-man orchestra playing on the street, and try to learn the Roman national anthem from drunken youth prancing by to some bar. The sensation of stepping into another era is difficult to resist, even when they follow the young men and women to a club playing Calvin Harris. What a night. They don't stay long, even though their new friends beg them to try the anthem again; there is so much of Rome to swallow in so little time, so they dance their way out of the club, promising to return and then rejoice down the stone cobbled streets, full of glee and gratitude that they had been able to make it. After everything that had happened in the world, here they were, at last. They hop and dance and stroll between alleys, over bridges, down-down-down until they are swallowed into the belly of Rome from over 2,000 years ago, 60 feet deep. The Great City within City. In the depths of the Palazzo Valentini they marvel at the walls, the underground paths and rooms hidden here from the destruction of time. Soft music floats in the atmosphere, classical Italian folk, and colored lights dance on the ancient walls and floors, showing off the stonework. They explore the rooms, heady with alcohol and awe. Soon, they find a circular room and choose to settle down on the ground. \"I brought candles!\" shouts Anna, rummaging in her handbag. \"I would have preferred a fire, real fire,\" whines Azenda, but Anna squeals, \"The authorities would kill us!\" \"You too like craze,\" laughs Mayowa, stretching his hand to help cup the fire Anna tries to scroll out of her lighter. When the three candles light up the room, their faces come alive. \"It's like being in your mother's belly,\" Mayowa observes. Now he watches Wandoo tie up her braids behind her head, her eyes cast down to her folded legs. Her lipstick has worn off and, sitting next to her, he can't help but wonder what her lips would feel like on [End Page 114] his, what her mouth would taste like, what her small tongue would— \"I just pray there is nothing radioactive or poisonous in this place,\" she says once she is done, and everyone laughs. Mayowa laughs the hardest, shrieks actually, his perfect teeth catching the yellow light. Azenda smiles. He once laughed this way when he and Anna first met. \"It is safe here,\" Anna assures her with her baby smile and musical voice, a voice that once sang soprano professionally, though briefly, a lifetime ago. She is sitting on Azenda's lap, but she is small enough not to obstruct him from watching Mayowa and Wandoo. \"People come here all the time. The only danger,\" she tur","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does Monogamy Suit You, and: Voice Broke, and: Mother Summer","authors":"Julia Anna Morrison","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911569","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911569","url":null,"abstract":"Does Monogamy Suit You, and: Voice Broke, and: Mother Summer Julia Anna Morrison (bio) Does Monogamy Suit You Rain through everything: Fall goes slowly this year, but I do not have timeto remember my life. Recently I dreamed my own son was small again. This is how much time has passed. I am making a film. I film every day,ten or so seconds, whatever I have to spare. Tonight, the moon falls out of the frame. I feel my husband watching me at the window. I am late for dinner, distracted by evergreensand plot holes in my life. One, in particular, whose details have gone missingI stare into. Recordings I refuse to delete clutter my phone: every snowand what we did with that snow. My husband takes off his shirt when he comes to bed. Come out of your shell, my mother always said before I went to school.I wear it like a housedress, a nightgown. In the bed, water pours down my face. I am clean and unmarried,still child enough to carry a child,to be transformed by another bleeding thing. [End Page 49] Voice Broke my phone died at four o'clockmy hair my lantern died your lawnmower bright yellow your computer died your heartyour broke lava lamp leaked your anklein the slick dark broke summer died the earthpassed you passed the park where the moondisappeared your child disappeared in a dreamyour childhood appeared you were a child thereswaying on the tree broke the branch diedthe treehouse in a dying tree stayed up until you outgrew itthey tore it down you saw them do it your grandfatherfelled your favorite tree the clock died at four o'clockthe car broke down the hallway your mother lostan earring back the heater died the camerathe radio you sang a song at your shoes matchedat your brother's burial your voice broke when you triedto speak about anything you stood next to the roadwaiting for help the trees stopped flashing you birthedin broad daylight a bright blue baby you diedor you would have died you decided to keep living afterto clean the house to dye your hair back to brown [End Page 50] Mother Summer after Johannes Göransson I am almost eight I can touchthe tops of the cupboardmy teeth half fallen outhalf grown in like a mealI will eat and eat the rest of my lifecereal at night in the blue dark lightnext to the bathtub where my toothbrushdrips like a faucet next to the faucet I get a green coat on sale that touchesthe floor edges the snow-covered roadfrom my house to someone else'smy son is not home tonight and I am alonethe bathtub is even empty I haven't killed a spiderin a very long time I think another family lives herewhen I don't when my son sleeps at his dad'she sends me his dreams on a piece of paperI open it in the morning with the curtainshe's dreamed of me again and I can't watch it Summer and I am six in the snow out the windowmy dad holds the video camera carves wood intosounds sleeps next to my mother who ismiscarrying in the red dark she bathes us the next daythe good kind of bubbles. I like when she wraps me in a towelwhen she lets me p","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Love Story","authors":"Jean McGarry","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911568","url":null,"abstract":"Love Story Jean McGarry (bio) Regina Her first love was her baby brother, Inky, and her second and last was Asa, your father and mine. Inky was away at the War when Asa crossed her path at the officers' club in Mohasset Bay. She was moving in a better class of girlfriends after her mother's early death and the sale of the house. When Inky was discharged, she had a check for him, a tidy sum. They wrote each other weekly letters until he crossed the channel into blackout. Captain Asa Birch, usn, stayed on this side, posted at the war college with a small part to play in the formulation of an aerosol deterrent. Inky was a foot soldier, Quartermaster Corps, at the rear of the line. The two gents met in the summer of '45. I have a picture of the uniformed sailor and soldier with our Regina in between, a big, floppy cloth flower in the opening of her crepe dress. They're drinking highballs. Why do they look dazed? They were on the brink of life with a clean finish to the early chapters. Perhaps just tired. Their girl has no smile, and her back is already showing the curve that would bring her womanly shoulders up to her ears. Man, woman, and brother. Inky and Asa would father eight children between them; and us, with our marriages and remarriages, a paltry three; and you and I, none. Asa took Regina for his bride while still in uniform, Inky overseas. Asa moved her to his rural town on the Canadian border, so when Inky was mustered out, he found his sister gone and the family house sold. He made his home with an aunt who kept house for four bachelor cousins. The weekly letters stopped. Inky didn't keep hers, but Asa had preserved Inky's with his own wartime letters to his sweetheart. When you found them, remember how you told me that Inky's expressed more feeling than Asa's love letters, so-called. Our father's love, so-called, never found its voice, no matter how tightly he clasped his human possessions. Regina and Inky were slaves—you said that—to their feelings, erupting in volleys of oaths, curses, and threats, and subsiding in tears and retreat. Our side of our family followed Asa's cue, folding up in ever-thickening wads of silence, leaving our mother to fend for herself. To the end, we gave her no quarter. This hurt most coming from me, the only girl. [End Page 42] Is this why I'm left an empty shell with no juice and no fancy clockworks like yours? Did Asa eat our lunch? Or did he just point, with a long, bony finger, to the golden rule of askesis? You can see that rule written on his own father's face, which no smile ever cracked. Asa knew it as self-mastery, mastery of others being a secondary gain, but our father—don't forget—didn't rely on others for anything he could do for himself. That's the real mystery behind the locked-room puzzle: why, not how. We so wanted to be in there with him, especially you. We were his children, we were his, but he wasn't ours. And he certainly—least of all—was hers. Am I boring you? Our family was a system—ma","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135738078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wild Guess","authors":"Anne Pierson Wiese","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911573","url":null,"abstract":"Wild Guess Anne Pierson Wiese (bio) Somewhere along the way, his feet fell off—our Nutcracker, with his genuine rabbitfur goatee and wooden jaw operatedby a lever disguised as red coattails.We never knew if he could actually cracknuts—he was too precious to risk breakage.A wedding gift, in fact, given in Decemberwhen the Nutcracker Ballet was havingits annual run. Thirty years later, the giverconfessed she had not known what to getus, had taken a wild guess; by then, we hadsurvived breakages of our own, the humanequivalent of old glue letting goand flat feet falling off the pedestal.The longer we stay married, the more we losethe fragile parts we can live together without. [End Page 67] Anne Pierson Wiese anne pierson wiese's first poetry collection, Floating City (Louisiana State University Press) received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Her second collection, Which Way Was North, was published in September 2023 (Louisiana State University Press). Honors include the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship and a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize. Copyright © 2023 Anne Pierson Wiese","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wisława Szymborska at 100, and: I'm Thinking Up the World, and: The Onion, and: Classic, and: Apple Tree","authors":"Wisława Szymborska","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911582","url":null,"abstract":"Wisława Szymborska at 100, and: I'm Thinking Up the World, and: The Onion, and: Classic, and: Apple Tree Wisława Szymborska (bio) Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss Twenty twenty-three marks the 100th anniversary of 1996 Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska's birth and the publication of her complete poems in the original Polish. The four poems included here are part of a larger translation project featuring works that span Szymborska's entire career, from her earliest collection which went unpublished, Czarna Piosenka (Black Song), to poems written near the end of her life. \"The Onion\" and \"Apple Tree\" are monothematic miniatures that, upon inspection, reveal larger metaphysical and political concerns. \"I'm Thinking Up the World\" and \"Classic\" take up the subject of art. In \"I'm Thinking Up the World,\" Szymborska, tongue in cheek, explores her own powers of poiesis to conjure up the world. In \"Classic,\" music tantalizes with the prospect of immortality, a way for artists to outlast their lonely, painful, and finite lived reality and connect with posterity. In \"I'm Thinking Up the World,\" which was first published in the 1957 collection Wołanie do Yeti (Calling Out to Yeti), the myth of the artist as creator writing the book of the world is marked by irony right from the start. Its opening verse parodies the aspirational project Nowe Ateny (New Athens), an 18th-century Polish encyclopedia of Baroque nonsense, whose subtitle reads: \"for idiots to learn, for politicians to use, for melancholics to be entertained.\" Compiled by the Benedictine friar Benedykt Joachim Chmielowski, it was intended as an enlightenment project, yet Chmielowski's entries are rather a primer in the shallowness of his education. Deficient in fact, they disguised their inaccuracy in flowery language intended to impress the reader and sell the book's usefulness. Szymborska avails herself of the irony of such a project and marks the difference by making the opposite claim: her \"second edition, revised\" is useless. In translating the parodic bit, I feared that the parody would be lost, but given the reemergence of Chmielowski and his project in Olga Tokarczuk's novel The Books of Jacob, my greater worry was the loss of the idiomatic nature of the expression \"psom na buty\" (translated here as \"shoes for a dog\"), meaning something not needed. The better world Szymborska playfully places in front of us presents a challenge: communication with plants and animals is necessary but usually unattained. It also presents a challenge to the translator, one whose [End Page 106] weight lies in the supple word \"jawa,\" which denotes a state of conscious responsiveness to external stimuli and is frequently contrasted with \"sen\" (sleep, dreaming) such that it pops up in moments of metaphysical uncertainty (e.g., \"is this a dream or reality?\"). \"Jawa\" is collocated here with the concept of language, as in \"jawa słów\" in the Polish original of the poem (translated here as \"reality of ","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Self-Portrait as Laundry","authors":"James Davis","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911563","url":null,"abstract":"Self-Portrait as Laundry James Davis (bio) Salvation is implied, posed as I amin front of a blurry, artificial Tannenbaumand my mother's crèche, its plaster lambsand pendant angel barely visible. I am a downy five months, my bald crownenhaloed by the base's Bavarian sun.My clothes, appropriately, seem clean:white jumper, white sleeves. Each white hand grips a side of the eggnog-hued hamper.My expression, a visual whimper,mirrors the dog's. His name, Burt.I've always thought the crux of the manger lay in the piss-soaked straw, the tang of goata sort of compositional antidoteto immaculacy. A shock of skunk-whiteclimbs Burt's chest to his black throat. We stare the same direction, toward the manwho handles the camera instead of a gun.He dangles a treat to capture our attention.I'm still too pure to know that I'm his son. [End Page 15] James Davis james davis wrote the poetry collection Club Q. His work has appeared recently in The Sewanee Review, diagram, The Gettysburg Review, Bennington Review, and swamp pink. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas. His website is jamesdavispoet.com. Copyright © 2023 James Davis","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"[I OEDIPUS on Mondays . . .], and: [I OEDIPUS in wilderness . . .]","authors":"Adam Tavel","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911571","url":null,"abstract":"[I OEDIPUS on Mondays . . .], and: [I OEDIPUS in wilderness . . .] Adam Tavel (bio) [I OEDIPUS on Mondays . . .] I oedipus on Mondays uncrinkle a pack of menthols and sit among the sallow hairnets reeking, hunched on their fifteens outside the rendering plant like penitents cross-legged on the curb, trapped in the stench of butcher smocks, wordless and there, watching their own spit dangle, then snap, then ooze down the gutter. How's that for symbolism, I say, holding out my smokes like a box of crayons, poor kid to poor kid. You see it in the eyes, lullaby in a minor key. Let's hum it here together, my eyes say, flicking my lighter against the creeping sheen of rush hour, sweat-drenched socks, the polis whirring like a hive. What song is possible here, their eyes say back, before that first pull hits and they blink away all names beneath the sun. Their temples soften with each drag as they mumble half-dreaming of a cool drizzle, how the kicker choked in overtime, four more days till payday. They smoke until they reach the door, where their headless bodies enter while they turtle-stretch beyond the jamb to blow away a final cloud. Minor key. Sea-dark, dirge-slow, you should sing it under your copper lady, a cartoon montage where heartland arms await all the little soot-cheeks. Sing to them as they gaze across the moon-glow prow of a dead century, longing to be possible. Belt them out, late verses no one knows, O beautiful for pilgrim feet, thine alabaster cities gleam. Dingy chorus, they already know how it begins, having bluffed their way aboard, crushed for a month, half-delirious and starved, their village names dropped like kerchiefs from a railing, they can hear it, midnight current lapping at the pier, jaundiced infants bawling in their arms, the majesty. [End Page 55] [I OEDIPUS in wilderness . . .] I oedipus in wilderness was freed from my limp, my race, my face, that is to say, the startled accident my own reflection once made across a chamber basin or stream whenever I crouched to rinse the nightmare crust from my cheeks. Freed of wrinkles, crow's feet, yes my eyes, freed my creeping brow and hair disheveled, overlong, silver as slanted winter stubble-wheat glazed with frost, like a widower's hair in that madness we call grief. No longer mine, I gave my shape to all the midnight darters scampering through the weary slump I called rest in rummaged hours hunkered by some outcrop stones or grove, apostate from the wind. But tonight, I watched your tweens as you idled yawning in half-embarrassment, parking lot podcast, impulsively checking your watch. I watched them lace their skates, those sons and daughters bunched in little cliques that whipped their wiggly loops across the rink while jellied rainbows dazzled on the hardwood sheen. The god of Friday nights blessed them all, giggly and coy, god of maybes, of holding hands, of desperate glances stolen at the curves, the spin beneath a disco ball whose irony is as irretrievable as a garriso","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Susanna Heller (1956–2021)","authors":"Karen Wilkin","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911577","url":null,"abstract":"Susanna Heller (1956–2021) Karen Wilkin (bio) In Memoriam Susanna Heller was a connoisseur of the gritty aspects of New York, enthusiastically embracing unexpected views, neglected corners, utilitarian infrastructure, and more. She found excitement and stimulus in things that most of us ignore or try not to look at, reveling in chance encounters with construction debris and improvised structures or in unusual views of familiar places. She evoked, in a wide variety of ways, contemporary life in New York with its different kinds of public transportation, endless construction sites, derelict street furnishings, traffic, and the like. A list of things that stimulated Heller's work would read very much like one by Stuart Davis, another passionate admirer of the modern city of his day, that included \"skyscraper architecture . . . gasoline stations, chain-store fronts, and taxicabs . . . and electric signs.\" An indefatigable pedestrian, Heller traveled remarkable distances from her Brooklyn home and studio on foot. A residency on a high floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center gave her yet another, vertiginous view of the city. The rapid drawings she made on her walks, which ended up paving the walls of her workspace, frequently became the basis of related works on paper, made in the studio. They also fed energetic paintings that translated her explosive, freewheeling graphite and ink lines and occasional patches of color into expressionistic urban landscape paintings. Some drawings are clearly casual, tossed-off studies, but others are self-sufficient, stand-alone images. Toward the end of Heller's life, when illness made it impossible for her to roam as she habitually had done, she drew the city from her window, contrasting expansive distances—sometimes observed, sometimes imagined—with pitiless self-portraits. She treated her own frail, pain-wracked, often bedridden body as subject matter with the same dispassionate eye she turned on abandoned lots and distant skyline views, never rejecting the unlovely or the disturbing. She had done something similar when her husband was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness years before. She drew him, unconscious in his bed, against the vast city view from his room, as if comforting and, perhaps, distancing herself from a nearly unbearable reality by concentrating on the deeply ingrained ritual [End Page 85] of making marks on paper. Heller's last drawings conflate her unsentimental images of herself with views of the ultimate urban place, now inaccessible but still infinitely desirable. Heller stressed spontaneity and speed, as if wanting not only to capture things seen, but also to recapitulate her awareness of her body in motion as she walked tirelessly across Brooklyn. The small size of most drawings suggests both expediency and intimacy, while splatters, scrawls, irregular shapes, and occasional collaging heighten our awareness of the physicality of even the smallest works and declare the art","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cooler","authors":"Elise Levine","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911584","url":null,"abstract":"Cooler Elise Levine (bio) i. casino I interview Friday afternoon, Saturday morning buy the pants—those pleats, that crease. The wedge shoes with arch support, and a good thing too. That night I clock miles over the blue-and-gold carpet, resting the dogs only in the marble-clad stalls of the ladies' restrooms where I briefly lose the clanging slots, the high roller's yips and groans—one of my new job's perks is that I never have to steal away to the basement and bless the employee can. I learn fast: no strolling or loitering when a player runs serious hot. Dan or Gustavo or Cynthia tips forefinger to brow, and I amble over to the big table and ask in. Don't let on that my chips belong to the house. Strike up an unassuming convo with the rocketeer and dampen the sparks. Not that I'm cheating or distracting—my mere presence does the trick. Nothing crackles from me. My luck? Failure to win. Killjoy, my parents taunted whenever the fam played Crazy Eights, and I cried over my starter kitty of 10 pennies going and gone. Sad Sack Samantha, Mom and Dad would jeer. World's sorest loser! By age 10 I knew that stoic resignation was my best, if not my only bet. Until I met Deb and leveled up. Got my awareness raised. My one and only old flame. She who trafficked in multidimensional, high-frequency attunements and how they flow. Or don't, in my case. I miss her. She failed to tear my heart out, but it was complicated nonetheless. We met-cute one rainy afternoon two weeks ago. I, assistant stockist at Shop Smart, 24 years of age, and newly barely degreed in business comm with a marketing concentration and so with little hope of moving the dial on my fortune in the world, uncharacteristically threw caution to the wind and abandoned my post stacking gum and candy bars to help scan her Tofutti—a product new to me and the store—at the self-checkout. She was something in her purple T-dress and yellow flip-flops and crystal pendant necklace, and I don't know what came over me—some sudden notion I had to, for once, seize the day—carpe diem ironically coming easily to mind, being my former high school's motto, but which pretty much had never pertained to me. When out of nowhere she pulled an eerie preempt by asking me out [End Page 132] for matcha when my shift ended. Me, matcha! In no time we were at the café next door in the strip mall, a place I'd previously eyed but, frankly, had been too intimidated to try. And she was reaching across a wobbly café table to straighten my twisted polo collar and, leaning close, swear she could see my muddy aura spike pastel peach. A smidge, she said, nothing razzle-dazzle—she liked to keep things real. That very evening we spooned on her couch—spooned!—and straight away it was all hard on me, not what I was used to. Winning for a change. It made my jaw ache, my feet itch. What's up? she asked when I crawled onto her carpet and curled on my side. I spilled the uncool beans. She sat up straight with her arms folded and a frown on he","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Accidentals, and: My Frail","authors":"David Baker","doi":"10.1353/thr.2023.a911570","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2023.a911570","url":null,"abstract":"Accidentals, and: My Frail David Baker (bio) Accidentals In the rolling field of years of sweet cornthree or four stalks now rasping dry-boned here and there among rows of new green soybeanslike us off course mis- placed as a swept mane of stars in endless reaching frozen darkin reaching endless frozen dark the stars like a swept mane mis- placed off-course like usamong rows of new green soybeans here and there and rasping a few dry-boned cornstalksall the years later in the rolling field— [End Page 53] My Frail Before the fallen the falling. The night the snow the evening shifting— Before the faint snow floating in the air—the sleepwalkers— The little basket of sorrows. Before this, more snow on top— Of old crabapple leaves gathering there for months the months— Before the piles in the dark corners the dark corners. Before— The falling, forty-five minutes each flake—the sidle-and-drift— Before the many things not said here among the never-to-be— Fallen—each shifting—each not-fallen not-said thing not said— Before my frail my basket what the future has already forgotten— [End Page 54] David Baker david baker's latest books of poems are Whale Fall (Norton, 2022) and Swift: New and Selected Poems, (Norton, 2019). Poems from a new collection, I Walked to the Water, are forthcoming in apr, New Yorker, Poetry, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Granville, Ohio. Copyright © 2023 David Baker","PeriodicalId":485043,"journal":{"name":"The Hopkins Review","volume":"377 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}