David Meischen's Blog

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Dear Gravity  May I call you Grave? An old tree falls  after long weakening, after years of unseen hollowing,  and it keeps falling, rotted core turning to damp dust,  becoming earth. The body its own trench.  At the doctor’s office, the nurse says  I’ve grown shorter. Only natural. I stare hard  but can’t wipe the pleasant smile off her face.  I am sinking not quite like a ship or a deflating balloon,  but like the house’s foundation. I am the house  and the clay it is built on and eventually  the unrecognizable ruin. My mother’s hips  are out of plumb; she lists like a sailboat  about to slice sideways into waves and then under.  My father’s head is even with my own, so he’s winning  the shrinking race. Imagine us becoming not just shorter  but thinner, not lying down for a last time  but disappearing altogether, like a popsicle  that has melted into a stain on someone’s smile.    Rebecca Aronson    Anchor    Winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing    Winner of the Annual Book Prize from the Philosophical Society of Texas    Orison Books, 2022

This poem is the first of ten in Anchor titled “Dear Gravity.” As a poet with aspirations, I confess I experienced increasing envy as I read each missive Aronson penned to gravity. I understand that wordplay can be groan-inducing, but I’ll gamble. This series of ten anchors the collection, each succeeding letter offering the poet—and her readers—further opportunity to ponder the inextricable link between gravity and the ravages of aging, the burden of grief as those we love succumb to the inevitable.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In the opening lines of this first letter to gravity, a tree falls to the weakening that goes with age. Trees fall—nothing out of the ordinary about that. But Aronson pays extraordinary attention: “rotted core turning to damp dust, / becoming earth.” Glance back to the capital on Grave. It’s an adjective in the opening line, but by the poem’s fourth line—“The body its own trench.”—we have arrived at a cemetery grave.

The word body having entered the poem, Aronson apposes three humans and their experience of gravity. She herself has “grown shorter”—an effect of gravity common to humans as we navigate middle age. Here we witness Aronson’s characteristic humor. After a nurse comments that her shortening stature is only natural: “I stare hard / but can’t wipe the pleasant smile off her face.” And then the poet’s blunt—also characteristic—honesty. “I am sinking,” she says, “like the house’s foundation. I am the house / and the clay it is built on and eventually / the unrecognizable ruin.”

And here, a masterful juxtaposition. The word ruin, a period, and then, continuing the same line: “My mother’s hips,” followed by the image of a sailboat going under, succumbing to gravity.

In the following line, Aronson returns to gravity’s effect on a body’s vertical dimension: “My father’s head is even with my own, so he’s winning / the shrinking race.” Aging, approaching death, we become “not just shorter / but thinner” and finally “lying down for a last time.” But there’s more to this poet’s imagination here. What if, instead of the final lie-down, humans could simply disappear, “like a popsicle / that has melted into a stain on someone’s smile”?

From the opening line of this first poem, I knew I was in good hands. When I got to the surprise of myself becoming “a stain on someone’s smile,” I couldn’t wait for more. I kept turning pages, and when I got to the end, I waited until the next morning and then re-read all the poems I’d starred on the table of contents. I want to keep Anchor on a near shelf in my study—so I can visit these poems again.

About the Author

Rebecca Aronson is also the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and finalist for the 2017 Arizona/New Mexico book awards and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize, 2007. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. Aronson is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.

Visit Aronson’s website here ⇒

Anchor is available here ⇒

An Occasional PSA from David Meischen

Please purchase books from your local independent bookstore and/or from independent presses. Avoid the Big A, which is in the business of gouging authors, independent bookstores, and small presses.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Snake in a Glass Box  If there is something sadder  than a snake, wild and honest  in a clean glass box  defeated, who does not move any fraction of an inch  when the boy taps the glass, I’m not sure  what that is. Her length hugs all four colorless walls  mouth to tail, she is become simply a rectangle of muscle  trying to remember, once animal, now  the measure of a sturdy glass box — and there!  the waiting mouse in a small cage on the shelf, unaware.    Kenneth White    Abandoned Mine, Issue 12, June 2025

One afternoon several years ago, a close friend and I were conversing over poems and food at a patio table here in Albuquerque. A passerby, newly arrived in our desert city, overheard us and stopped. I think it was Robert Grant, but it might have been Jasen Christensen, informing us that the two friends were preparing to start a poetry journal, Abandoned Mine.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Pleased with this kind of serendipity, I submitted poems and had work published in the second issue, May 2022. In the interim, I’ve browsed—and admired—the poetry at Abandoned Mine. The twelfth issue, June 2025, includes the short poem that opens this mini-essay.

Like other poets whose work appears in Abandoned Mine, Kenneth White writes with admirable clarity. The syntax here is simple and straightforward—but never clunky, never dull. I cite the opening sentence here, which moves rhythmically over the space of three couplets. The first comma wins me over, with the first of two unhurried pauses depicting a particular snake and earning the word sadder from the opening line. And then this: “she is become simply a rectangle of muscle / trying to remember.” I think of Rilke’s panther, reduced to the dimensions of a zoo enclosure—wildness caged.

This poem need not go farther. White might close with his snake, “once animal, now / the measure of a sturdy glass box”—as if permanently unmoving. But there is more to this glimpse of a pet snake’s life. There is—predatory surprise—“the waiting mouse in a small cage on the shelf, unaware.”

Five couplets, ten lines. Glass box, pet snake, tap on the glass, mouse to be swallowed—this microcosm is complete.

About the Author

Kenneth White earned his MA, Poetry, in the seventies but only started seeking publication in 2023. His poems have appeared in the Paterson Literary Review, Comstock Review, Pinyon, California Quarterly, The RavensPerch, Stone Canoe, Front Range Review, and Abandoned Mine. Now retired from a career in animal rescue, White lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Treat yourself to more poems at Abandoned Mine ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’ll open with a short poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Resuscitation  For a second: jackrabbit prints on snow and you’re in the  frame again, lifting your arms to lower the sky for me.  On this side of Bridge Street we collect all the dead  sunflowers, cut rot from an amaryllis bulb  to end its dormancy.  Our box turtle wakes thin in spring. Asleep  all winter she witnessed  nothing. For a second small as a strawberry  all my dead are alive.    Sara Daniele Rivera    The Blue Mimes    Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award    Graywolf Press, 2024

Loss permeates the pages of this remarkable collection. The poet bears more than a single grief, but her father’s death is the primary loss here. “You,” she writes. “My father.” Her poems remember him so vividly that, line after line, he lives for us—and surely for his daughter the poet. Grief is about what we have lost but also about what memory can save.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“Resuscitation” saves three details from an ordinary winter day. The poet notices “jackrabbit prints on snow.” She helps “collect all the dead // sunflowers, cut rot from an amaryllis bulb.” But notice her first stanza break: “we collect all the dead”

In the moment, yes, we are hearing about bloomed-out sunflowers being gathered to make way for new growth as spring approaches. But a father has been lost—likely the you addressed in the opening lines; others have been lost. On page 47, as we read Rivera’s third line, already we have witnessed the magic in poems that “collect all the dead.”

Three short stanzas in, Rivera breaks from the immediate moment to comment on her box turtle waking from hibernation. “Asleep / all winter she witnessed // nothing.” So far this poem has lived in one ordinary succession of moments—and beautifully so. But then, set against the word nothing: “For a second small as a strawberry / all my dead are alive.”

I revel in this phrase: “a second small as a strawberry.” I revel in a surprise entirely unexpected—this odd fusion, a measure of time experienced as the taste of a single delicious berry. I revel in the transformative power of surprise, that, if only for a moment, “all my dead are alive.”

Note

On August 29, 2019, twenty-five poets gathered at the National Hispanic Cultural center here in Albuquerque. Twenty-two of these poets had been invited by then Albuquerque Poet Laureate Michelle Otero—to read poems in memory of those who lost their lives in El Paso on August 3, 2019. The reading culminated with the presentation of a collaborative poem by Hakim Bellamy, Jessica Helen Lopez, and Michelle Otero, all of whom have served as Poet Laureate for Albuquerque. Sara Daniele Rivera was one of the twenty-two poets recruited for this event. Her poem for the event, “Fields Anointed with Poppies,” is also the last poem in The Blue Mimes. Like the other poems Rivera offers here, this one is well worth your attention.

The poems from August 29, 2019, were collected in 22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso. Dos Gatos Press published this little volume, but Michelle Otero and the contributing poets deserve the credit for the poems and the event. Disclosure: I’m a co-founder and publisher at Dos Gatos Press.

About the Author

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator. Sara's poetry and fiction use both speculative and realist lenses to explore themes of grief, migration, memory, and the liminal spaces between language and silence. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, cats, and turtles.

For more about Sara, see her website ⇒

The Blue Mimes is available here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Premonition  Solemn are lonely mornings in February.  Snow drops off poplars with shivering shyness.  On weathered wallpaper the outline of  a windowpane slants with trembling ochre.  Oboes launch into a procession of chaconnes,  and leaves still rustle, falling from slowly  revolving chandeliers.  Forgotten by someone or by us,  there’s an open Riesling  and years sealed with wax.  The home we left belongs to the dusty  boots of an alien, nomadic spirit —  discomfort, the flying clang of trams  that won’t take off, the curtains, once  pulled shut with their segment of the sun,  cut in vermillion.    Elina Petrova    Donetsk, 1990     Translation for Equinox, Volume 8, Inner Chambers, Secret Rooms, March 2025

These days, with endless Russian depredations in Ukraine, complicitly enabled by our own government, poets such as Ukraine native Elina Petrova can open windows into a world most of us see only in glimpses on the nightly news. “Premonition” is one such poem, published earlier this year in translation. A native of Ukraine, Petrova immigrated to the United States in 2007. An American citizen as of 2014, she is the author of two English-language poetry collections, Miracle (2015) and Desert Candles (2019). Disclosure: I wrote a blurb praising Desert Candles.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Like the Ukraine-based poems of Desert Candles, “Premonition” is not didactic. Rather than telling us what to think, this poem offers moments in a winter setting, images that flash in the space of a line before the eye moves to another image of desolation.

From “Snow drops off poplars with shivering shyness,” the poem shifts indoors, to light on “weathered wallpaper.” And then, the first surprise—that wreckage of some kind has brought the outdoors in—as “leaves still rustle, falling from slowly / revolving chandeliers.” What I admire here is how deftly Petrova drops us into a room in which leaves are falling and then selects a single tabletop detail I picture beneath the chandeliers: “an open Riesling / and years sealed with wax.” Let that last phrase resonate—“years sealed with wax.” Notice how the word years opens the poem, how the image expands to include a history of such rooms.

A damaged space such as this one is essentially incomplete—no door that closes safely behind us as we leave. An honest photograph—or poem—will render it in fragments. Hence, this poem’s final couplet, leaving the place, the poet, the reader with an incomplete line, a shard—curtains “cut in vermillion.” Oh, and the stanza break: “curtains, once” — so much in the word once suspended there. Once, as in “once upon a time,” with the fairy tale turned apocalyptic. Once, as in once and no more—like other moments, other lines from poems that limn the end of something vital.

Notes

This poem appears in Equinox, a remarkable journal published twice yearly at the spring and fall equinox. The version here is the poet’s translation of her own poem. According to Petrova, “my recent translation for Equinox completely changed the original form and rhythm of a poem I wrote thirty-five years ago in Donetsk. The Russian version consisted of five rhymed quatrains with extensive alliteration.”

Equinox is highly recommended reading. Enjoy it here ⇒

For more about Elina Petrova, see her website ⇒

Aching Miracle is available here ⇒

Desert Candles is available here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

First, a short poem for your day:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  In an Aftertime  Memory gnaws on me in the blue silence  of the withered hillsides where  cracked, earth-stained quartz stones—  mammoth molars?—trip me.  I think I may be just a trick the sky is playing,  a vacancy for the cicada’s incessant trills  and pinecone bits snowing down  from the squirrels. Whatever falls through  the trees falls through my eyes.  It’s September. Wild sunflower faces  tilt back as if just freed from  the dark earth into sharp daylight  like the subway riders who emerged that day  to see people fleeing and falling  in the fast-forward collapse of civilized steel.  For years the workers found teeth  in the rubble, no bigger than the pebbles  I scatter now by walking. Whatever debris  falls through the lines I’m writing  in my head, it is an inadequacy.    Radha Marcum    pine soot tendon bone    Winner of the Washington Prize (The Word Works, 2024)

The poems of pine soot tendon bone invite us to calm ourselves, to let go of daily distractions and ease into the landscapes this remarkable poet shares with us, to let surprise enter when we’re ready to receive it.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The title of the poem I’ve shared above has just a tinge of the dystopian, a survivor’s account of days in the aftermath of endtime. And the opening lines follow through. Memory is feral, violent; it gnaws. The hillsides here are withered. Scattered stones look like gigantic teeth scattered in a vast boneyard. Amid reminders of ruin, the individual shrinks, the I rendered insubstantial: “I think I may be just a trick the sky is playing, / a vacancy.” Still, the poet brings us into a peaceful scene, a quotidian scene, with “pinecone bits snowing down / from the squirrels,” where “wild sunflower faces / tilt back as if just freed from / the dark earth into sharp daylight.”

Then, smooth as the movement of a simile, sudden as a jetliner turned weapon, we are in the before of this aftertime, with “subway riders who emerged that day / to see people fleeing and falling / in the fast-forward collapse of civilized steel.” Notice how the before has been foreshadowed: Planes flying into skyscrapers looked like “a trick the sky is playing.” Sirens converging on September 11 were cicada-shrill. Shredded paper falling from office windows looked like “bits snowing down from the squirrels.”

Marcum doesn’t dwell on details of the day the towers fell. Rather, she touches on a single image that returns us to the here and now of her mountain walk: “the workers found teeth / in the rubble, no bigger than the pebbles / I scatter now by walking.” From boulders that look like mammoth molars to human teeth scattered like mountain pebbles.

“debris falls” as the poem closes with another echo, a slant rhyme reminiscent of Dickinson. Earlier, Marcum saw herself as a vacancy. Now, a humble admission, that her words—our words, any words—are an inadequacy.

About the Author

Radha Marcum is a poet, writer, editor, and teacher with a focus on the intersection of the environment, culture, and personal history. She is the recipient of the 2023 Washington Prize for pine soot tendon bone (The Word Works, 2024). Marcum’s first poetry collection, Bloodline (3: A Taos Press, 2017), which delves into her grandfather's involvement in building the first atomic bombs in New Mexico during World War II, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry in 2018.

Note

Support authors, small publishers, independent bookstores. Avoid the big A when you order books.

pine soot tendon bone is available here ⇒

Bloodline is available here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Larry McMurtry’s Moving On has one of my all-time favorite openings to a fictional world. Outside a Texas rodeo arena, Patsy Carpenter sits in a warm Ford eating a melted Hershey bar and reading Catch-22, when a beered-up cowboy unzips beside her car and pees on the front tire. I’ve been chuckling ever since. I love how McMurtry includes concession stand chocolate and serious literature in the same breath, how the beer-drinking behavior of the rodeo world intrudes into Patsy’s private experience. I’ve carried the surprise of this opening scene with me for five decades.

Fifteen years after Moving On arrived on bookshelves, Lonesome Dove moved McMurtry onto a much larger map. First came the Pulitzer, then the masterful miniseries. But years before all this, the movies had come knocking. McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), might have faded into the obscurity that awaits so many regional writers. Except that two years later Hollywood turned it into Hud, starring Paul Newman at the peak of his career. And several years after that: The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s mood-drenched black-and-white adaptation of McMurtry’s third novel.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In my post of two weeks ago, I mentioned hearing decades back that McMurtry had a T-shirt saying simply, “Minor Regional Writer.” That word—regional—has been much on my mind lately. Here’s what I’m thinking. Yes, Lonesome Dove earned Larry McMurtry national, even international standing. But he was—first, last, always—a regional writer. What makes his fiction worth the bother is that the words, the sentences, the pages meticulously recreate the specifics of a region, a place, a rodeo parking lot.

The best writers locate us—in a provincial English ballroom with Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, in Toni Morrison’s Not Doctor Street or Hemingway’s Italian field hospital or Chicago streets in winter as only Richard Wright could have known them.

We should all of us aspire to be regional writers. And not worry about words such as “minor.”

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

On April 5 two years ago, my good friend Tina Carlson and I drove from her home in Santa Fe to the Scissortail Literary Festival in Ada, Oklahoma. Scissortail was the discovery of a lifetime—three days hearing fellow writers read poetry, fiction, and memoir, three days knowing that as festival readers ourselves, we were in the best company. Each year, festival director Ken Hada brings in three featured writers. In 2023, the features included Major Jackson, a poet with national prominence, and Allison Amend, who read from Things That Pass for Love, a stunning collection of short stories. Last but not least was Octavio Quintanilla, one of my favorite poets. A week or so ago, Octavio was selected as Texas Poet Laureate for 2025-26.

At Scissortail, I got to mix with Texas writers I’ve known and admired for years, including Lyman Grant, Brady Peterson, Alan Berecka, Ann Howells, Alan Gann, Audell Shelburne, Sarah Webb, and two former Texas Poets Laureate, karla k morton, and Alan Birkelbach. I heard work by writers I hadn’t known before: Benjamin Myers, Paul Juhasz, Hank Jones, Rilla Askew, Joey Brown, Denise Tolan. . . . The list goes on—one delightful surprise after another.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I returned to Scissortail in 2024 and 2025. This year marked twenty years of the festival. Ken Hada succumbed to subtle pressure and agreed to be one of the festival’s featured writers. He read from Visions for the Night, a new collection published by Turning Plow Press. I’m at about the halfway mark. About these poems, let me quote from the foreword by Paul Bowers:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Ken Hada is a poet who comfortably rejects clear boundaries,   although his work would seem filled with them: light and dark,   the four seasons, beginnings and endings, youth and old age.   But these are mostly offered as moments of transition, signaled   by unexpected sights, sounds, whispers, songs—human or   bird produced—that speak out of the coming light or coming   darkness.

And that brings me to a further surprise—and a reminder. Small presses! They are alive and well and doing the good work of putting good writing in the hands of readers. Turning Plow Press is one of them. As I have discovered since my first drive to Ada, Turning Plow has published other writers I’ve met at the festival, among them, Paul Austin, Alan Berecka, Julie Chappell, Hank Jones, Paul Juhasz, and Cullen Whisenhut.

Decades ago, I remember hearing that Larry McMurtry owned a T-shirt saying “Minor Regional Writer.” From the first paragraph of The Last Picture Show, McMurtry always seemed something more than either “minor” or “regional.” Today, then, I want to quibble with the word minor. I want to preach the gospel of regional writers. Hence, the subtitle I’m adding to my blog.

Notes:

Visions for the Night is available here ⇒

Check out Turning Plow Press here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

As a devotee of film noir, I’ve long forgotten the first time I encountered Sunset Boulevard—or how many times I’ve seen it over the years. Count me as skeptical when a musical version debuted in London thirty-plus years ago. I couldn’t imagine the dark-lit world of the film translated into stage sets and songs. But then. Ten days ago, my best friend and I found ourselves in orchestra seats for the current revival running at the St. James Theater in Manhattan’s Broadway theater neighborhood.

Spoiler Alert: If you intend to see the current revival, I’m about to give away the show’s opening moment.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Billy Wilder’s film opens with police sirens racing to a palatial estate. Cut to the dim-lit swimming pool, where a man—William Holden—floats face down, shot dead but, through the magic of noir storytelling, able to narrate from beneath the waters of his death.

As curtain time approached for the revival, two questions pestered me. What kind of scene would open the play / would the revival attempt to suggest a swimming pool onstage? Would the dead man as depicted in the1950 movie serve as narrator?

The curtain opens to a dark stage. No setting. On the floor at center stage, an amorphous shape, also dark. Then: the distinct sound of a zipper. An arm reaches up from the dark shape, a man unzipping his own body bag. He extricates himself. Stands. Begins to sing his story.

Instantly, I suspended disbelief. And watched, enthralled, as the surprises continued: Klieg-light-equipped cameraman onstage filming perfect black-and-white images simultaneously projected, immersing the audience in the ambience of film noir. At one point, the lead male roamed backstage corridors and walked out into the street—followed by the cameraman. I have rarely seen such a creative translation from the world of filmdom to the landscape of musical theater.

The two leads carry this revival. Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, faded movie star descending into madness. Tom Francis as the doomed writer turned gigolo for Desmond. They’ve been nominated for Tonys—Best Leading Actress and Actor. I’m rooting for them.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

On February 8, I arrived an hour late for the Bad Mouth reading here in Albuquerque. Good luck can result from one of my memory lapses. In this case, Jenny George, who stepped up to the mike shortly after my arrival and read from After Image, a new collection—one stunning poem after another. The reading included a couple of poems with the same title: “Jenny George.” These open with accusatory declarations. “Jenny George is a failure,” says one. And another: “Jenny George is not to be trusted.” From first line to last, I love the wry, self-deprecatory tone of these self-titled poems. Here’s one:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Jenny George    Is not to be trusted. She will tell you  The soul narrows until it is just the breath.  She will call it a violent narrowing.  But her words are just images gleaned  off a dying girl like an apple peel  pared in a slow spiral off an apple.  She herself has never passed through  that hollow reed. An unreliable narrator  they used to call it in the seminars.    There are things you simply can’t know  until you have lived through them.    At any rate, strangers now wear the girl’s clothes  on the streets—the very streets  she and Jenny George would walk  with ice creams melting over their hands.  Or while a slew of blossoms  gusted suddenly through that corridor.    You might see a red dress crossing  in the crosswalk. The hem of it billowing.      Jenny George    After Image: poems (Copper Canyon Press 2024)

The poems of After Image are meditations on grief. They observe. They itemize. In this one, the poet steps back, using third-person point of view to look at loss as a phenomenon that happens to someone else. There is a blunt power that comes of cutting the I out of the poem: “her words are just images gleaned / off a dying girl like an apple peel / pared in a slow spiral off an apple.” I can’t vouch for George’s intention here, but in the paring image I see the superstition that if you peel an apple in a single motion and throw the peel over your shoulder, the peel will land spelling the name of your future love. These are poems about losing that person. The most important person. The one you love.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“Jenny George” moves on to further surprise. The deceased lover’s clothes have been given away, have appeared in the street where she walked with the poet, eating ice cream “while a slew of blossoms / gusted suddenly”—slew meaning many, meaning a murder of.

George’s closing couplet echoes the earlier mention of her deceased love’s clothing, worn by others now, in public:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  You might see a red dress crossing  in the crosswalk. The hem of it billowing.

A skirt hem billows from the movement of air, billows like breath, like a departed love’s breath.

About the Author:

After Image is Jenny George’s second poetry collection; her first is The Dream of Reason. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

After Image is available here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

On October 12, 2022, I was glancing at fiction shelved on the wall of books in our great room when I spotted a novella I had no memory of purchasing, no memory of shelving there. I turned to the first page of Cary and John by Houstoninte Neil Ellis Orts, read a couple of pages, and surprised myself by tearing up. This little book is the story of best friends Gloria and Cathy and the love letters they discover written between their fathers decades in the past.

Cathy has found the letters in one of the boxes left behind by John, her recently deceased father. She brings them to Gloria; her father was Cary, also deceased. Both women are reeling from the discovery of the secret their fathers took to their graves. Gloria, a devout churchgoer, is horrified. Convinced that homosexual behavior is a damning sin, she has refused to allow her gay son to bring his partner into her home.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Short chapters with the two middle-aged friends alternate with the letters in their possession. For me, the first and lasting surprise of Cary and John is Gloria herself. The novella opens with her. It includes her daily ritual of prayer, her deeply felt conviction that her gay son is on the wrong path. Orts steps back and gives this woman space to be herself. As a gay man, I was—and am—convinced that she’s profoundly wrong, but I can see that Gloria is trying to do right—by herself and her beliefs, by her son and her love for him.

And the letters! Cary and John live in these letters. Their love breathes in the words they write to each other. Their individual selves shine. Cary is seriously buttoned down, acutely conflicted, weighing judgments against himself, resisting the word love. John is an extrovert plain and simple. He knows that he’s in love with Cary; he openly expresses joy in the sexual pleasure he and Cary experience together.

John’s letters bubble over. He can’t resist the intensifier Ha! This little tic might have been annoying, but Orts writes John so believably that his ebullience charms. In one letter, he reports on the children who have moved in next door, into the home previously occupied by Cary and his family:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Yikes, but they’re loud! And the parents either don’t care   that they have howling wild animals for children or they’re   too overwhelmed. . . . Cathy says she might get a babysitting   job out of of them. . . . I said not until she had her rabies shot. Ha!

Daughters who loved their fathers, fathers who loved their daughters. Fathers who loved each other. There is heartbreak in these pages. And the lasting surprise of hope.

About the Author:

Neil Ellis Orts is a native Texan, a farm boy from the south-central part of the state and a city man currently living in Houston. His interests have taken him to study theater and performance and theology as well as to dabble in endeavors that don't fit neatly under those headers. He is a generally curious individual.

Cary and John is available here ⇒

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.