Simon DeDeo and Elisa Gabbert
Poetry Editors
Absent Magazine
17 October
Dear Editors:
Please consider the enclosed poems for publication in Absent Magazine. They are from my manuscript, X = Pawn Capture. I picture the chessboard as the field on which my grandparents first made love, and atop this, the series of black and white squares represent their commitments and arguments and unholy sacrifices for the children who will never live up to their hopes, and the chess pieces are the grandchildren who further disappoint them. For the time the board is actively telling the story of their meeting, like cinema, it flashes with trees and words, subtitles which I am imagining entirely. And my grandmother’s dress opens to its inside lining, against which the projector shows her when she is young, and opening again her dress, and inside that dress the dark lands of her upbringing, with, if you look into my head into my imagination, tiny figures approach who will not be friendly.
Every pawn move on the board creates some kind of weakness, and as she grows into womanhood I can only envision (by combining her songs with the food she cooks) what she remembers of this crucial teenage time: a wallpapered part of the parlor with a portrait of a Lord with an open chest and a flaming heart. It must be October 17th, when Margaret Mary Alacoque saw the heart in fire and grace that made her a saint, a pretty saint who is always represented by her dark habit fluttering and the Heart of the Almighty afire. My grandmother remembers that when first she saw my grandfather, somewhat fine in his knee boots and carrying a rucksack of grain, approaching from across the hill, his shirt was half torn from some argument. It kindled a typical want or desire that a human understands as love but if she were a Saint, my grandmother would have seen right through this phony vision and sent the mortal packing.
Thank you for your consideration, and for reading. I have enclosed an SASE, and look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Amy Newman
Simon DeDeo and Elisa Gabbert
Poetry Editors
Absent Magazine
5 November
Dear Editors:
Please consider the enclosed poems for publication in Absent Magazine. They are from my manuscript, X = Pawn Capture, a lyrical study of chess as a metaphor for childhood: my grandfather told me nothing about either but required that I participate in both. At the late hours of the afternoon my grandmother humiliated the cabbages for the evening meal, and when we blessed the softened food we were about to receive, I understood how everything we owned was really metaphor for absorbing light and goodness, as in the cases of Maria Fortunata Viti, for whom the sacrament was something to consume like a leafy green, or Elizabeth of Schonau, so bright and unafraid against her ecstasies.
One afternoon my grandmother had her bridge club over to introduce the new couple in town to the church, because she knew that the wife was a temptress and it was the club’s intent to serve cheese crackers and crab puffs so that the speech about His Love would go down easily in the midst of their socializing and the new couple would join the flock. I was delighted by such Eucharistic intervention, a diversion of the wafer in church. He appears all over inside and out while you are concentrating on the soft wafer and your throat and stomach on its caloric absorption.
But my grandmother said the wafer is not a Holy hors d’oeuvre it is a sure piece of evidence and proof He is with us but that’s what I meant and even as I carried the trays of crab puffs with their pink interiors I decided it was right to think so because isn’t grace the invisible what-ness of Thou in wherever we find It or more to the point, where we perceive and experience the adornment of all that love? That even a silence such as what you practice with me dear editor, I know in my heart your quiet wisdom and strength and the all-knowing all-loving hope for a fallen generation is such grace, even for this fallen sphere we maintain in gravity, this earth, this round and holy flowery mess of a bouquet tossed from Eden? Tossed with disappointment, I think, too.
Thank you for your consideration, and for reading. I have enclosed an SASE, and look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Amy Newman
Simon DeDeo and Elisa Gabbert
Poetry Editors
Absent Magazine
18 February
Dear Editors:
Please consider the enclosed poems for publication in Absent Magazine. They are from my manuscript, X = Pawn Capture, a lyrical study of chess as it was played in my family: the first move is considered not an advantage, but a disadvantage, so no one will begin, which makes for a darkening of the afternoon as the light through trees withdraws and the grandfather cigar dominates, and the child believes: I never should have come here. I’m not yet speaking of my birth.
But when I imagine being born it is something like the Wordsworth sleep and forgetting, since I never saw a mother with grateful tears through discomfort or a dad with a small cuddly toy, the kind of fetish that sets the children dreaming of a soft, pleasing life to come and chattering in class a giddy play song. I vaguely picture two faces shaped like insects, their heads traversing a car window in a drizzly afternoon and the blank and rude speedometer grinding in, my grandmother babbling about sticks and stones, and those insect heads—which I take to be distortions through the squint of child eye and the blur of rain, the rush of shame or hurt invented by families—diminishing to the smudge of windshield glass times speed, then divided by the distance of something crying.
But I think I had to invent this memory for a short story or a paper, the subject of which was a drive we had to take cross-country into our imaginations. It did not require documentation or proof of ownership. It did not require fact-checking or buyer’s remorse. Who may confirm from whence memory derives, or to where it should propel us as we think, and what are the terms: direction and not velocity? Breadth and not depth? The sound of the window closing on the choking fear, or just after?
A road is a line going forward and back, and behind my head is an arrow pointing thusly, toward what I picture as parents. And I am offspring, shooting like an arrow toward my grandfather’s dining table, trussed up with the slanting afternoon ticking the ashes from his cigar’s diminishing shape. Am I right, professor? Is this how I should represent myself on paper? I know you won’t respond, preferring the justice of silence, the instruction of meditative thought, and I have to agree. You know this and this and this, for you have the instructor’s edition, and are the maker of this earth encompassed by strings of road like a ball of yarn. Such is our doing and our undoing, our hemming up, and our disentangling. It is a kitten’s story you made from your delight that unravels in a weariness of flaw. I will write again, though. All roads lead to you.
Thank you for your consideration, and for reading. I have enclosed an SASE, and look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Amy Newman