Issue Three | May 2013
We bring you Issue Three of Sundog Lit. This is a really great issue, and we’re so proud…
I’m so pleased to have a poem, “Sugaring,” in this beautiful issue:
In one state I was born knowing how to nest
potted in small duties
in a crooked porch town
I grew buttoned against the wind
Last night, I taught my last class as a graduate instructor at the University of Minnesota. I had struggled with how to end class—how to tell them what I wanted them to know—and I told them so.
We sat in a circle as evening came on, on a lawn that had been under snow as late as last week. This is a rough transcript of the letter I read them. (feel free to share with attribution, and please note I quote from Mary Ruefle’s “Remarks on Letters.” Big debts to my teacher Charles Baxter, as well, for his good thoughts on stories.)
Mud Luscious Press shuttered its doors very suddenly and sadly just as the forty millionth fucktonsnowstorm started fucksnowing outside my window. I am grading papers and listening to a Fleetwood Mac record. I am thinking of the 3rd years in my cohort who turned in all their great thesis work today. I am fixing tiny errors and moving little stuff very quietly inside my cows before I send off my final, final edits to Magic Helicopter tonight. It’s bruising to hear Russ has lost his book on the night I feel like my chapbook is one step closer to being actually real. All I did at AWP was take drinks of whiskey and then cry happiness. I also kept saying, “I am so afraid it’s going to be taken away from me somehow.” To know that that has actually happened to another writer, much less one who I have been collaborating poems with for over a year, who has been hugely important to my poetry being any kind of smidgen of visible in this dumb, shitty world, is rib breaking.
It’s sad because MLP is one of the first presses I ever really understood as being this small press that was DOING IT, that was publishing the exciting writers they really believed could show us something about Livinglanguage with that capital L.
[…]
Go buy out the rest of MLP’s stock here. Go show them your love everywhere.
Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp was due from Mud Luscious next month. Gabe was the first writer I met at UMass. Fun Camp has been in the works as long as I’ve known him. I read an early draft of it for workshop on a spring night as clear as tonight and could feel its plot and rhythms homing true on their good, funny, tragic work. Somebody needs to pick it up. I’ve never read anything like it and I have yet to read it whole.
No one said times were good, but words
got us a long way. Some said out east,
some back east, and rightly or not we guessed
which skies they were pointed toward and which
they assumed we, too, ignored. Wonder was
at all times preferable—had you ever seen
such silent contrails? Something
in the sense of a late decade.
You could reach all the back shelves
with years to spare. Most likely
tastes were as canned as they seem now
but they were the latest we had.
Daylight held hours after the sun.
We turned off TVs. Someone had a Frisbee and
someone sparklers, and the same kids cycled past
until only their voices showed in the dark—
no sound of traffic, and I thought how it would be
if in fact everyone was where they were going.
photo: Doug Wilson, “Smog Covers Tacoma, Obscuring the Foothills Below Mount Rainier, 6/1973” | Documerica Project
I cannot say what anyone wore. Were skirts
about the knee? Was it the year of crochet
or of failed pants no matter how we belted?
I remember we had squirrels. The weed killer men
arrived while we slept. You rushed undressed
and though we were soon hidden
the way you stormed back to me I wondered
who had seen you and what they would say
if I knew who to ask. Later that week or the next
you said: where did the squirrels go?
We have the worst answers.
In the passenger seat of a Honda Civic
at dire speed over half New Jersey
I felt the weather compel our flight while NPR
considered all things except what we were thinking.
