Chemistry
We were side by side in chemistry. Hands touched the same beaker, still, no reaction. I remember your cheeks were warm streaks. We learned about the water cycle. I knew all about it. Rising heat and condensation changed the course of thundering, rainfall. But I didn’t brag much, when we …
Read More
Radicle: An Interview with Fred D’Aguiar
Fred D’Aguiar is a celebrated British-Guyanese poet, prose writer, playwright, and Professor of English at UCLA whose career has spanned 35 years. D’Aguiar’s many accolades include earning a Guyana Prize for Literature and being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. As a writer, …
Read MoreQ&A with Co-Editor AJ Bermudez
I recently had the chance to catch up with AJ Bermudez, whom we were excited to recently welcome as Co-Editor of The Maine Review. Here’s a bit of our chat. – RG Rosanna Gargiulo: What brought you to The Maine Review? AJ Bermudez: I’d happened upon an exceptional piece early in …
Read More
Seraphic Clowns and Saintly Mourners, an Excerpt
December 24th 1963 11:50 pm EST. Those who are famous, those who are wealthy, those who are elderly, and those with children arrive early and find privilege in the sitting, in their asses growing cold and sore on the hard wooden benches. Austerity now is necessary for fertility eventually; this …
Read More
Basho’s Death Poem, New York City
Sick on a journey my dreams wander the withered fields – Basho In an old notebook were the beginnings of a poem about Basho’s last poem, the one he composed while he died. In the notes, the speaker walks from 31st Street to 17th in Manhattan and remembers Basho’s lines. …
Read More
Faith at A&W
Dear Josh, Today, I pulled my A&W mug down from a cabinet. There was a dead spider in it, a thick coating of dust on the rim. It’s been thirty years this spring since I stole that beveled glass mug, thirty years since I saw you. Do you remember sledding …
Read More
I Loved Lucy
I wanted to be like Lucy—trapped on the IRT with a loving cup stuck upside down on my head— and not get mugged. To steal John Wayne’s footprints from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre without remorse, then bunk with Ethel for a whole week, mindless of half-naked show girls, the fact that …
Read More
The Devotions
Sneezing and shiner-eyed in an entire landscape ripped by wind and today I wrestle every negative arriving my inbox while finches feast on suet, rubbing round heads to each other, to glued seed. March is and did and has just …
Read More
My Birthfather Explains His Death
Antarctica, 1979 Death is not dark as you’d imagine, but white, frozen, your name signed into the otherworld of stone and ice. It’s easy to die — one day you’re 22, offloading a Coast Guard cutter, and the next, you’re tumbling toward the snowsheet, pinned beneath it, your heart slowing …
Read More
These Things Permit Less Gratitude
Rising like westerly smoke, the death last night was beautiful. I’ve got no reference for forests burned to ash, transformed to sky, but for now I’ve named this East Coast evening – Dimmed. Disappointment in Dad’s bloodshot grey, become Maine sunset. I shudder with the coming morning. Death may be …
Read More