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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Short Fiction<br />
A Song for Mr. Solomon<br />
By J. Scott Cameron<br />
The cicadas surfaced on the east coast the previous Friday. The hissing mass – the hydraulic<br />
combustion of some immense extraterrestrial engine emerging – appeared firstly just south of Chesapeake<br />
Beach, an hour’s drive east of D.C. By Saturday morning, they were suckling on every species of<br />
tree or grass from Key Largo to Asbury Park. The numbers that season caused the ground to balloon<br />
into one veinous abscess along much of the eastern seaboard. As they seeped from the subsoils, enveloping<br />
the surface in their discharge, the turf deflated and then depressed into the emptied nests creating<br />
a sort of trench line. Despite a panic-stricken citizenry and the disastrous effects of the collapse, the<br />
new structure was seen as a fortuitous omen and memorialized into the National Parks System by that<br />
Monday afternoon.<br />
Jake was stirred awake by the chiming of a billion wings. He lay listening to the vibrating<br />
rhythm before slipping back into an unmemorable dream. Two hours later, he would miss the initial<br />
call from his father’s phone. Jake’s hands were too soaked in dish water, and besides it had been nearly<br />
two weeks since they spoke. This would be a long visit. There was a busy Monday ahead and preparation<br />
was necessary before returning the unannounced call. His dad would have expected the delay, per<br />
usual – Jake hated surprises, particularly the calls that had commenced one winter morning three years<br />
prior. He had been quite content with the way things were, but a relationship developed nonetheless.<br />
Mr. Solomon, per usual, would leave some composite of a voicemail, even though he was well aware of<br />
his son's routine. When Jake finished cleaning and organizing, he returned only to find more missed<br />
calls.<br />
“Is this Mr. Solomon?” A strange and pensive youth materialized on his father’s end of the<br />
line.<br />
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