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 />
<strong>Then</strong> all I see is her, and for once, she sees me.<br />
“Enough, don’t make a scene. You are acting exactly like your father.”<br />
The life around me comes to a halt. A clock ticks in the distance, but the time never changes.<br />
“Mom.”<br />
That’s all I can say. Yet despite the desire to make myself as small as humanly possible, I push<br />
through my clenched jaw and say the words buried inside.<br />
“I don’t want to be you, Mom. I love you. But I don’t want to be you.”<br />
That’s all I can get out. I want to see how she responds before I say anything else. For once, she<br />
is speechless. Her jade eyes are frozen in time, frozen on mine, and for once, I’m the one who gets to<br />
speak.<br />
“In my life, you have not only been my biggest supporter, you have been my biggest abuser.”<br />
That last word trips off my tongue, though it has been spoken a million times in my mind.<br />
“You are the person who taught me to fight for those I love. Who taught me to show strength<br />
when I’m at my weakest, and to stand when everything around has fallen. <strong>To</strong> be honest with who I<br />
am. That’s the problem. I don’t know who I am anymore. No, that’s not true. I’m you.”<br />
Tears swell but never fall. If they did, she’d criticize me for not being able to hold down my<br />
emotions at a moment like this.<br />
“<strong>To</strong> know you’ve left a mark on me more painful than any knife or bullet terrifies me. <strong>To</strong><br />
know that one day I will be too drunk to differentiate if I’m looking at a photo of you or a mirror.<br />
And that one day I will hold such a weight in my heart I will want to bring down those around. Perhaps<br />
going so far that I’d want to cause the same trauma on myself that you have done to me. That,<br />
should I ever have a daughter, she will become the targeted victim of my own pain.”<br />
The way daughters go to their mothers for comfort when they are afraid, I can’t help but do<br />
the same. She’s never helped me escape the monsters under my bed. Why would she help me get rid of<br />
the one she put inside my head? But despite it all, she is my mother.<br />
“Mom, I am scared, more than anything, to be you.” There is nothing left for me to say. Rather,<br />
I’m not strong enough to say anything more.<br />
10
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