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
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Prose<br />
cancer wasn’t the lung kind. He had Leukemia. You’d think finding out that my dad had fucking cancer<br />
would have flipped the quitting switch in my addicted brain. But that’s just it. My addicted brain.<br />
It’s not even an addiction to the high. It’s a tactile addiction to the feeling of the butt between my<br />
index and middle finger of my left hand. I’m a lefty by the way. Let’s just say I feel incomplete when I<br />
don’t have a Winston Blue loosely tucked between those two commanding fingers.<br />
Whenever I feel especially guilty about my habit, I try not to be too hard on myself. I always<br />
joke about it saying, ‘Well, at least it’s not heroin.’<br />
I texted my father almost immediately after my mother and sister left. I wasn’t in the right<br />
headspace to call him, nor was he to receive my call. A text would be better for now.<br />
Hey, I heard about the situation. Love you. I have the day off Wednesday so I’ll probably come see<br />
you with mom and Luna. I’m more than happy to cut your hair too.<br />
It took me a while to find the right words. He never was the stereotypical ‘father figure,’ always<br />
more like a friend than anything else. We aren’t related by blood, so we have our own way of talking to<br />
each other. My text reflected that — caring but not in a suffocating way, and the less words the better.<br />
I didn’t want him to know how scared I was deep deep down.<br />
I included the bit about cutting his hair because that was something that we shared, father<br />
and daughter. I later started cutting my mother and my sister’s hair, but it had started as something<br />
between the two of us. I mentioned it in my text because my mother had told me that he wanted me to<br />
cut his hair, but she wasn’t sure if I could handle that. I wasn’t sure if I could either, but I hoped that I<br />
would rise to the occasion without tears.<br />
Smoking is a vice. It’s a coping mechanism that I’ve become fully addicted to. Anytime I feel<br />
the urge to quit, something comes up in my life that dashes my good intentions, and I am off to the<br />
closest tabacchi to shell out another five euros for that ‘last pack.’ Every time I go home, an essential<br />
stop before hopping on the flight is a tabacchi to stock up. In the States, I’m not yet of legal age to<br />
purchase cigarettes, so when I first started smoking at sixteen, it was my scandalous secret. I guess it<br />
was the first time I felt rebellious and grown-up.<br />
A few days later, we drove to Albuquerque. I had my trusty haircutting scissors with me. On<br />
the drive there, I couldn’t breathe. A severe anxiety about erupting in tears when we finally arrived was<br />
2
Change language