AUR LitPut III Spring 2023 - From Now To Then
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria. The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced). The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta. Rome, May 2023
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is
having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria.
The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced).
The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta.
Rome, May 2023
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Prose<br />
“Thank you, I love you. I’ll see you soon.”<br />
The rest of the summer went by quickly. I was physically and mentally exhausted from working<br />
at my main job, eight hours a day in the boiling sun five days a week. Sometimes I was working<br />
twelve-hour shifts when a wedding needed a busser or waitress in the evenings at El Rey Court. The<br />
other two days of the week, I worked in consignment, eight-hour shifts. What remaining time and<br />
energy I had were dedicated to supporting my family. While I was building my savings for returning to<br />
Rome, I felt the weight of responsibility. I had a lot of time to think about my role in my family as the<br />
eldest daughter and sister; my time home was almost entirely compromised by my various jobs. <strong>Now</strong> I<br />
was going to flit off to Rome again as if everything was fine.<br />
It wasn’t fine. It wasn’t like I was attending a state university, or even an out of state university<br />
where it was easy to catch a flight for a weekend visit. I only visited home twice a year because I live<br />
across the Atlantic Ocean and an eight-hour time difference away. I kept asking myself whether I was<br />
being selfish.<br />
When I thought of how this was affecting my little sister, I shed a lot of tears alone in my car<br />
with a Winston Blue tucked between my fingers, hanging out of the window. I smoked and cried and<br />
got mad at myself for smoking because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to fix any of<br />
it and it was the most unsettling feeling I have ever experienced.<br />
<strong>To</strong>wards the end of my time in New Mexico, my father’s younger sister came to stay with him,<br />
temporarily relieving the responsibility from my mother, who was going to Albuquerque several times<br />
a week to take him to and from the hospital. I had lunch with my aunt one afternoon, and I told her<br />
about how guilty I felt about living so far away.<br />
“And you know how close I am with Luna, I feel like I’m not doing enough to support her<br />
and it’s killing me. My mom works so hard to take care of everyone and I don’t want her to burn out. I<br />
feel like I should be staying here where I can step up for everyone involved.”<br />
Rhonda had had cancer too. She’d battled skin cancer and come out of it. I didn’t know this<br />
until my father was thrown into it. Her perspective meant a lot to me.<br />
“Nalu, we are all so proud of you for starting your life so fearlessly in a new country and<br />
following your passion. Your father understands your position and wants nothing more than for you<br />
4
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