Mattapoisett. Poetry Capital of the World

Today’s poetry news begins with an announcement: A poetry reading is about to take place! We wanted to include details of this reading simply because we think it’s fun to say Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. More poetry news brings us to the EU. Do you have any idea who the EU President is? Might be good to know if you’re an aspiring poet. Look, we know it’s hard to get a book published and land a university job teaching. But maybe it’s time you approach things differently. Our advice is to become the president of the EU and then publish a book of haikus. It worked for Herman Van Rompuy,who views politics and poetry to the beat of eight syllables. In a brief interview the busy politician said, “Moreover, haiku is brief, which is convenient for people who have no time to labor over long poems.”

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As he leans over the ground, digging small holes, he thinks about a news item he’d heard that morning. Anchovies wash up in the millions on La Griega beach near Colunga, Northern Spain. They lay dead, useless detritus, on a sunny beach so far away. His daughter is here, but not here, beside him, but somewhere else.

He sticks his thumbs into the square bottoms of the pansies compact root system and shows his daughter the way to crack and spread the bottoms so that they will take root. The next time she says “Mama,” he’ll slap her quick and tight. Look what I am trying to do here, he tells her. She stares with eyes the color of swamp just like her mother’s. This is life now. The dog was another casualty of their new lifestyle. When its ribcage and spine became prominent he’d given it away to the woman who smiled to his face and cursed him under her breath as she walked away, dragging the dog that’d already lost its will. He just can’t seem to figure out the formula for thriving.

I’m thirsty the girl says. Always some goddamn thing, now and forever. He shoves the water bottle at her. She only turns her nose up at the dirt that clings to its plastic sides. He hands her a soda which she takes without thanks.

They plant slowly. She is thirstier now than she was before. He stands up and kicks at the dirt with his bare feet. From the ground his daughter looks up, shading her eyes with her hand, big ones for such a small girl. Because he is too tired to speak he wiggles and arches his brows. She ignores him, then startles at a car that rounds the corner, passing them by, going somewhere.

Later, on television, they interview a fisherman who laments “It’s a disaster because they’re so rare, and now they’ve killed themselves running from something.”

He holds his girl in his arms, and reaches for her hands which goes limp in his. He sees the dirt crusted under the fingernails, but will not wash it away tonight. In Spain they call them bocartes, and they are precious things. He whispers the name into her ear over and over, and sees a slow smile wrinkle across her pale face. He lets her water the flowers and watches as she holds the hose over each one letting the water beat the delicate petals down. He knows that later they will burn in the sun.

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Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her fiction has been published in Word Riot, Rumble, Eyeshot, elimae, Monkeybicycle , JMWW, Blood Orange Review, Apt, Pequin and others. Her fiction chapbook, Natural Habitat, will be published by Burning River in spring of 2010.

View From The Top

We hiked Cold Mountain this weekend. Yes, that one. It is our favorite hike. It rides over several balds and along a harrowing path that crosses a ridge called the Narrows. The Narrows is an appropriate name — the last 1.5 miles rises to one of the highest mountains in the Shining Rock Wilderness. The climb is treacherous, but we know it well. In our teenage years, we raced our friends to the top. Today, we’re just happy to make it to the top. In his book, Charles Frazier never mentions that a plane crashed on the north side of the mountain in the 1950s. It’s always eerie hiking that stretch. Anyway, we returned to civilization with much to be found on the internet, including David Foster Wallace’s dictionary searches, and an essay about his guest introduction to The Best American Essays of 2007. Perhaps you’ve read it, but have you read it in Qatar? Wallace’s life is being examined exhaustively these days, but in a reexamination of Dickens, The Atlantic finds an art that was saintly, but an artist who was a bastard. Nick Mamatas reads an author’s biography before he reads the author’s actual work. The Rumpus has an interview with Kevin Keck, and “if you like Bukowski, King Crimson, drinking, smoking, fucking, finding beauty in the world, cats, and croquet, then you will like [his] books.” Finally, we love our sports, and Deadspin has a look at biographies of Dimaggio, Williams, The Brownsville Bum and Buster Keaton. Step right up! – Andrew Geer