Seek the Generosity of Image (Michael Intro) (04/10/2021)

A recap of the week's writing at Atticus Review and a request for support. Intro by Michael Meyerhofer.

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I got vaccinated against Covid today. The nurses waved me in, my car joined a vast serpentine column like children lining up for the cafeteria, then another woman whose face I couldn't see came up to my window and injected something that might as well be magic into my left arm, just below the shoulder. Afterwards, she applied a bandage that featured what looks like a purple donkey braying on a yellow field, and asked me to pull into a nearby parking spot. Just wait fifteen minutes, she said. If you feel fine after that, you can go. It hasn't been fifteen minutes yet but I'm fairly certain I'll end up feeling fine and this morning will end in drive-thru coffee and lazily answered emails, my blood growing accustomed to its new permanent houseguest, that yellow bandage slowly loosening. As I sit in the parking lot with the engine idling, it's hard not to imagine the last time: waiting in the car with my grandmother while a nurse came out to inform her of the results of her Covid test. She'd already been coughing a little while I arrived at her house for a visit, and by the next day she was having trouble breathing (though she still insisted on filling my belly with lavish home-cooked meals, smiling broadly as she told stories of caring for me during the many surgeries that typified my childhood). Despite precautions, the same fever found its way into me next, weighing down my lungs as I sat on the porch and watched stray cats play in the garden. However, while I recovered, she did not. That seems especially poignant now, given the ease with which I was just rendered immune to something that took down the toughest woman I've ever known.  The dashboard clock tells me it's time to go. I glance up and see that the parking lot is more crowded than ever, the highway beyond increasingly congested with people on their way to work, to lunch, to so-and-so's funeral. Before long, all these masks will disappear. We'll stop sanitizing our hands. And the only reminders will be the empty chairs at the dinner table, and of course, all those poems and stories and essays we've yet to write.  When I was young, I was obsessed with finding the meaning of life, and so all my poems felt like cement, weighed down by bad, parsimonious philosophy. But these days, I'm more concerned with the shape of a stranger's glasses, the glint of sunlight on a fire hydrant, the straightness of a dragonfly's back as it crowns the flowering bushes lining the parking lot. That's a lesson it's taken me all my life to learn, if I've truly learned it at all. But it's one my grandmother tried to show me each time she carefully washed and peeled the carrots, every time she refilled my glass or held a door for a stranger, or went to see a friend in the nursing home. And it's what I crave the most in writing: the generosity of image, the humility of silence. And it's what I'm thinking about as I drive away, waving thank you with an arm that suddenly feels as though it's a little sunburned, my grandmother's smile already dissolving into line breaks.   Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here. Michael MeyerhoferPoetry Editor

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THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FICTIONELBOW MAGICby Wendy Oleson"You’ve seen similar infomercials for various products but none with your grandmother’s endorsement. Do you need another reason to dislike your body or spend money?"READ ON

POETRYSCROLLINGby Morgan Cross"It has been 21 weeks since your last Instagram post. It has been 44weeks since the photo of sunflowers in the backyard. It has been 68weeks since your friend commented: GORG. It has been 101 weeks..."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONMARKING TIMEby Amanda Yanowski"In twenty years, I will wish Sarah and I were hey, remember that time? friends instead of the kind that chat for two minutes in a grocery store aisle every other holiday season. I will ache to throw stones that shatter the past wide open."READ ON

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