THE HISTORY OF LIGHTNING

Ama Codjoe

Through what gulf am I wading, wanting a husband, but not wanting to be a wife, as when my mother burned the bacon and started over again. He liked his eggs over easy. And not for the first time, it was the history of lightning that drew me from the shore where I was sunbathing alone, tan against pebbled sand, no company except the night heron, the palm tree, a fish twitching in glitches of light. And again it was history that drew me, chest deep in water, toward earth instead of paradise—the scent of deodorant, clean hands, large against the beast of my body, darkness of white bedsheets, stillness before hurricane. And when I opened my eyes there was someone, familiar from a night dream. But what I am naming, what I am trying to admit, is not about a person or even the legend two people make, it is a thirst dizzy with daylight. It is a hunger with a mouth like a sore. Sometimes, for years at a time, I forget how birds take the shape of leaves. I forget my musk. I can’t speak the secret language of eyes. There are times I press my flushed cheek against the cold floor and others when I sigh up and down with branches of pine. Even fish slip through air like water.

[HORNS WITHIN ]

Devon Walker-Figueroa

I too have studied deserving, served myself dessert six times a week when I thought of fathers as a heavenly breed of ghost. Now I care more for snails, the brittle helices they haul over the dirt, the thin mucosal lines they trace in cursive on my windows late at night (like a pledge or curse, a blessing or a poem about sex). I get them as a sylph gets the air or a jester the errors of kings. Sometimes while getting nailed I think about them, how it’s not really their fault the sun can touch them to death, how instead of feathers to lift them into a great confusion of blue, their coat of spit fuses them to earth, refuses to let the tongue of them taste too much beyond the dirt. It occurs to me their horns are sightly when extended: sticky as anthers, tender as fingertips, they rise & fall in a private largo. Once, when the moon was glued high up in its vault of indigo, I pressed my breasts against the pane the snails adhered to like a law. They traveled over me, not even noting the nothing that I donned. “Why not put me to use?” I asked them. “Make of me a public, tell your tales of falling so deep inside your cargo! Or how coolly you cure the rose bush of its blooms before you’re dipped in butter!” At this, one lifted its near translucent head, let spread the ruffles of its wet foot. Another flared its one lung, pressed a jelly eye against the glass. Any other time, I would have left the window latched, as drafts leave me uneasy, but I was woozy with a need that night to inch it open, watch that slick procession of recluses traverse my windowsill & then discharge themselves onto my unmade bed. They wanted to procure me. I knew that much. I knew by their failure to speak up. They slid gradual as dawn over my sheets, their paths marked out in droolish threads, then rose in spirals up my calves, my trunk, my neck & narrow chin with its vague cleft. They climbed & climbed, conspired & grew terribly thirsty till they found the more obscure parts they sought out. First came the complication of the ear, too small a hall for grown-up shells to pass through. Then the mouth, its lips through which they slipped, pretty as sin. They clung to the roof, the budded tongue, the blushing crypts of tonsils, only to lose interest & go down the dark hatch to find a bed of leaves & overseasoned leftovers. The snails sit heavy on my stomach, I confess, mock me from within, but it’s not their fault. They still write me letters in my sleep, cursing any father who’d sing me past asleep. I think the world, & likely always will, of snails. They tell me to tell the rose bush how to die. They tell me they could never leave me as the daylight does.

Contributors

Michelle Chihara is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Karen Cheung is a writer from Hong Kong. She is the author of The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude and Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Lauren Collee is a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Baffler, Real Life, The Rumpus, Another Gaze, Chicago Review, and elsewhere.

Kate Durbin is the author of four books, including Hoarders (Wave, 2021) and E! Entertainment (Wonder, 2014). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, and elsewhere.

Rosa Boshier González is a writer, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in Guernica, Catapult, The New York Times, and Artforum, among others.

Hervé Guibert (1955 – 1991) was a French photographer, critic, and author. He published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography.

Daisy Hildyard is the author of two novels Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in the north of England.

Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) spent his very early years in Zurich, then grew up in Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New York. He studied environmental design and architecture at MIT and received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975. While at MIT, Hsu studied film at the Carpenter Center, Harvard University. He moved to New York in 1979, where he currently resides. His first exhibition in New York was at Pat Hearn Gallery, and in 1987, he had a one-person show at Leo Castelli. Since the mid-1980s he has shown extensively in the United States, Europe, and Mexico.

Hsu’s survey exhibition, Liquid Circuit, was on view at SculptureCenter, New York from September 2020 to January 2021, following its first iteration at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. His work was recently included in the 59th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at the Arsenale. His first public outdoor sculptures are currently on view in the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet?, organized by Sohrab Mohebbi, in Pittsburgh.

Elaine Kahn is the author of Women in Public (City Lights, 2015) and Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020).

Max Lawton is a writer and musician, and translates Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish literature. He is the translator of 10 books by Vladimir Sorokin and two books by Jonathan Littell.

Joanne Leonard (b. 1940, Los Angeles, CA) is renowned for her trailblazing photographic practice, which largely intersects photo-collage and feminist ideology to recognize often overlooked intimate and deeply personal moments within women’s lives. Leonard’s work, which she describes as “intimate documentary,” has appeared in noted critical and feminist texts, including Lucy Lippard’s “From the Center”, and she is widely known for her visual memoir, Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008), which uniquely shares Leonard’s experiences as feminist, academic, single mom, identical twin, and daughter of an Alzheimer’s patient and their influence on her artistic practice.

Leonard’s photographs have been featured in exhibitions at major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), and are also held in the collections of such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), and the International Center of Photography (New York, NY).

Dana Lupo is a writer and the translator of Hervé Guibert’s novel Arthur’s Whims (Spurl Editions, 2021).

Maya Martinez is Florida-raised and a living poet.

Bernadette Mayer (b. 1945, Brooklyn, NY) was the author of over thirty books including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), and most recently Works and Days (2016) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer is remembered as an influential teacher and editor.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of six poetry collections, a collection of stories, and the novel Swimming with Dead Stars. Her poetry collection The Old Philosopher won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. She received the 2022 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.

Kenneth R. Rosen is a writer and foreign correspondent based in Central Europe. He is the author, most recently, of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs.

Helya Salarvand was born in Babolsar, Iran, in 1998. She is a recent graduate of UCLA with a BA in gender studies. Her current work spans acting, writing, and modeling, and aims to explore the nuances of Iranian American queer identities.

Kali Tambreé is a writer and PhD candidate living in Los Angeles. She is from Baltimore, Maryland.

Thao Thai is a writer living in Ohio with her husband and daughter. She received her MFA from Ohio State University and her MA from the University of Chicago. Her debut novel Banyan Moon is forthcoming in 2023.

Paul Thompson is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, New York, Pitchfork, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021). A 2023 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar, her writing has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Brian Whitener ’s recent projects include Face Down (2016) and The 90s (2022), as well as the critical volume Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (2019) and a translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero’s Thought, Practices, and Actions (2019).