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 />
Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues<br />
By Nalu Gruschkus<br />
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up. I started<br />
salivating and my index fingers drummed the picnic table as if to signal withdrawal in morse code.<br />
It was about seven months ago. I hadn’t been home even two weeks from my first year of<br />
college life in Rome. I worked as the pool attendant at The El Rey Court Swim Club, Santa Fe’s<br />
wannabe version of a stuffy, hipster country club. I loathed my job, but the money was good. The best<br />
treat after a grueling eight-hour shift was a Winston Blue. Or two, depending on whether I decided to<br />
take a joyride before making my way home, which was usually the case.<br />
The thing that killed me the most was that he wasn’t even the one who told me.<br />
It was a scorching day in June. I was wearing a white t-shirt that I had cut up and flowy linen<br />
pants to avoid heat stroke. During my lunch break, I sauntered over to the picnic table to meet my<br />
mother and sister. They had brought me a burger from Shake Foundation.<br />
My mind went fuzzy when my mother told me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what she said, but<br />
I can tell you that she was unsure of the words coming out of her mouth. Almost as unsure as I was<br />
hearing them. I was left with a bad taste. Or maybe that was just one of those come and go moments<br />
when your gums bleed. I desperately wanted to conceal all aspects of this new reality with the deepest,<br />
lung collapsing initial drag.<br />
Smoking feels as natural as breathing to me. Maybe even more so at this point. Moving to Italy<br />
was the first real catalyst in turning ‘social’ smoking into chain smoking. Once you graduate with a<br />
masters in chain smoking, quitting is only appealing to the dead. I’d like to make excuses for myself,<br />
but the situation is clearly fucked up; my own father was battling cancer. He wasn’t a smoker and the<br />
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