Laura Cesarco Eglin’s poem, “Makeover,” appears in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Summer 2019 issue. Blue lipstick in remembrance of days of intense cold of nails turning blue and lips to match when she’s tired she applies eyeshadow where the bags under her eyes should be, she feels free to mark her spirits rising the red lipstick […]
“Are they gone?” Danny gasps. He is still a heap on the platform, motionless except for the heaving of his chest.
“Nope,” I say. “We’re gonna have to wait.”
Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing
Black Ecstatic Ode Read More »
I believe the climate in America has changed and we are moving towards a best and worst of times situation. Those who revere naked power, and who want a “strong” man over democracy, are feeling emboldened. So too are the mediocre, the bullies and the bigots. Those of us who believe in democracy must fight back daily and art is one weapon among many—though art is a million things besides a weapon.
“Love/it was exactly like this/when, for the first time,/we stepped toward each other/like two people folding a bedsheet”
I waited for Nathan to pass his gaze over me and smile, fumbling for a compliment and finding none. Instead, he put a hand over his heart and dropped his jaw. “And look at you! My god, Andy—isn’t she the spitting image of Björk?”
The transformation to bird woman happened so quickly in the past three years. Having my binoculars with me everywhere I go is surely the first clue that I’m always on the hunt.
Thirty years ago, when she was first here with her husband and two young children, they’d come in the summer—June—so that Otto could teach a study abroad course, and the city then was a lush racket of color. The pale blue and pink and gold ornamental bric-a-brac of Belle Époque architecture. Stoops cluttered with terra cotta pots spilling herbs. Window box gardens bursting geraniums the startling florescent red of she-didn’t-know- what. It was all exactly as she’d envisioned Paris since she’d first wanted to go as a sixteen-year-old sitting in a high school French class.
Hope misses the city, and I miss Hope. So every other weekend I buy a bottle of wine and drive up the valley to see her and Little Girl in their new suburban home, where they live with Hope’s boyfriend, a pilot.
