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 />
school English teacher, the random stranger who took our order at In-N-Out. The waitress who<br />
brought us our drinks couldn’t help but comment on our resemblance.<br />
“Oh, how you two look so much alike, such beautiful girls. You’re so lucky to have such a<br />
beautiful momma.”<br />
I can’t blame strangers for comparing us. Yet as I peer down at the plate, I try hard not to see<br />
what they see. Pure blonde hair versus dyed-crimson. Jade eyes in contrast to what my grandmother<br />
calls my “miel de sol.” The same blood runs in our veins, but the sun casts different shadows upon us:<br />
her ghostly skin, my natural tan.<br />
My hands run along the mask of scars she etched into my skin. She’ll never have the same scar<br />
on top of her eyelid. She’ll never have the bald spot I can feel if I run my fingers where she pulled out<br />
my hair. Her hands will never have the same wounds mine have. She’ll always deny such things, and<br />
makeup seems to blind her to all she inflicted.<br />
Despite all the differences, the face that looks back at me from across the table is the same.<br />
The averting motion of my eyes resumes. French fries, her fourth glass, strangers strolling by, back to<br />
her eyes. Damn it. Yet as I peer into her jade green, I notice the restive movement of her own pupils.<br />
I see her. I see someone who is just as uneasy being here. Someone who will also fix her gaze on<br />
anything, even the most meaningless object.<br />
She taps her fingers against the side of the recently emptied glass, beckoning the passing waitress.<br />
Her nail chimes against the stained glass, an impatient song ringing through the still air.<br />
“Another?” she asks — a single note, laced with a slur. “With a bit of extra fun in there as<br />
well.”<br />
Her plastered smile hardly hides the fact that she’s already had one drink too many. That with<br />
this next one will come more wounding words about things she hadn’t noticed with her last glass. Her<br />
eyes scan our surroundings before going back to mine.<br />
“Why are you treating your food like a damn toy?”<br />
I break up another fry as the waitress sets down the full margarita.<br />
Focus on something else. My hands, the crumbs that were once food.<br />
Don’t stare at the plate again. A dog walks across the street, it looks like mine.<br />
8
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