Nidhi Zak / Aria Eipe: “In its March 2019, The Atlantic published ‘Nobody’s Going to Believe You,’ an article detailing the outcome of a year-long investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood director Bryan Singer. Journalists Alex French and Maximillian Potter interviewed over 50 sources—men claiming that ‘they were seduced by the director while underage; others say they were raped. The victims [….] told us these experiences left them psychologically damaged, with substance-abuse problems, depression, and PTSD.’ One of these men, Victor Valdovinos gives a detailed account of his experience of sexual abuse by Singer, and its aftermath. Valdovinos was thirteen years old, in seventh grade, at the time it occurred—he hadn’t even had hist first kiss yet. Over the years, he started to question ‘how his life might have gone differently if not for that locker-room encounter with Singer. ‘What if he never did this to me—would I be a different person? Would I be more successful? Would I be married?’ As he watched the Harvey Weinstein scandal unfold, Valdovinos thought, ‘Me too—only I was a kid.’ He considered going to Singer’s house and knocking on the door and asking him, Why? He thought about going public. But who would believe him? This is for Victor. Because I believe.” (web)
Julie Price Pinkerton: “Traveling has always felt strange to me. When I was seven, my dad took our family on vacation to Washington, D.C., so we kids could learn more about the country he loved. He took us to meet our congressman, John Myers, and filled our week-long itinerary to the brim. Amid stunning monuments and museums, the thing I found most fascinating (aside from there being some new, otherworldly food in our hotel called honeydew) was that we encountered a taxi driver who smoked a cigar. I had never seen a cigar before. Five decades later, the small, unexpected parts of any trip are still like catnip to me. While at the beach last May with my husband, Scott, the shark scene in this poem unfolded in front of us. It’s a perfect example of what I’m drawn to most: numerous little chunks of strangeness pulling together like a pile of paper clips snapping onto a magnet. I could relate to every part of it. I was the crowd of nosy bystanders, the duo of fishermen, and the small creature minding its own business when it suddenly lands inside a snow globe of agony, looking for someone to rescue it.” (web)
David Miller: “Another year of teaching Latin, another year I will have to tell my students how to behave among white people at Latin conventions, at the Getty, at plays. It is always difficult to do. I do not know whether I make a difference by doing that. It is like the advice we give our own children to help them survive the world. This poem is a reflection of that uncertainty, of the pain of loss and the ambivalence of time.” (twitter)
Nancy Miller Gomez: “Poetry helps me to make emotional sense of my life. Each poem is a struggle to clarify something I don’t yet understand. ‘Deadbeat’ came to me with the line, ‘you’re more romantic now that you’re dead.’ That line is no longer in the poem. What remains is the idea that we carry the ghosts of those we’ve loved both before and after they’ve died. ‘Supernova’ grapples with my experience of grief as something both tangible and immeasurable.”
Jackleen Holton: “The Trump campaign imploded this week, although it has been headed in that direction for some time, and although the media continues to milk the sideshow for ratings. If there is any symbolic meaning to the butter sighting, it may be, as Jan Castellano, the woman who found the contorted face looking back at her from a tub of Earth Balance said, she hoped his campaign ‘melts away like butter.’ But that can’t happen if we continue to give this candidate our attention and energy. Meanwhile, the Olympic games provided a welcome, sometimes inspiring distraction. While the precise nature of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s relationship with Adolph Hitler was not known, she did praise him effusively in a letter she wrote during the war, and she benefited greatly from the Nazi regime in a way that only a few individuals can with such a system in place.” (website)
Aliki Barnstone: “Like many people of Greek descent, I come from refugees. My mother was three months old when she and her family were thrown out of Istanbul during the ‘population exchange,’ which Greeks call ‘The Catastrophe.’ The refugee crisis is personal. I know the land and seascape and the spirit of the people who are fleeing, as well as the people who are helping. Greece is going through an economic crisis that is worse, according to studies, than the Great Depression was here in the U.S. Nonetheless, every day, Greeks are saving refugees, providing them with water, food, dry shoes and clothing, medical care, and, tragically, burying the dead. All my waking and dreaming hours, the tragedy of the refugees is in my consciousness, along with my ordinary, daily life as a professor at the University of Missouri. The refugees, too, once had what we consider ordinary lives. In this sense, a peaceful life with food and shelter is extraordinary. One of the videos I saw showed a young boy who said, ‘We need peace in our country. We don’t want to live in Europe. We want to live at home.’ The people are so desperate for their lives that they board unsafe boats with their beloved children and babies, in winter, in high winds. One of my friends, John Tripoulas, is a surgeon on the island of Ikaria. He had to examine the bodies of drowned refugees to do DNA testing. One of the little girls, he wrote, ‘was wearing white boots, pink gloves, and there was a Mickey Mouse patch sewn on her sweatpants.’ Many of the refugees land on island of Lesvos, also known as Mytilene, where Sappho lived. The translation of Sappho in the poem is by my father, Willis Barnstone. He read me Sappho ever since I was a little girl, so her work is etched in my memory. And John’s description of the way a little girl was dressed for that deadly boat ride reminded me of Sappho’s poem about her daughter’s headband. I wrote this poem after I heard the news that 24 had drowned off the coast of Samos. That was Thursday. On Friday, at least another 37 drowned off the coast of Turkey, among them children and babies, trying to get to Greece. 244 have died in January alone. As of this writing, 55,528 have entered Europe, most of them through Greece, and now the rest of Europe has stopped welcoming them. If you are moved, please donate to the U.N. High Commission on Refugees or another group that is providing help.”
If a radioactive substance is placed in the dark in the vicinity of the closed eye or of the temple, a sensation of light fills the eye.
—Marie Curie, doctoral dissertation, 1903
The sensation of light
is light. There is no way for her to know it.
She is so young and so in love, marrying
an equal, choosing for her gown a navy dress
suitable for use in laboratories. Hand in hand
they slip through the university courtyard—
Pierre and Marie Curie, in the world before the war.
One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night,
she wrote. To perceive on all sides
the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles
and capsules of our work. That light
marbles and embarnacles them both,
turns their fingers strange and fibrous.
Soon enough he cannot rise from bed.
It was really a lovely sight and always new to us.
She loses twenty pounds. Two pregnancies.
There is no way for her to know that her light
will soon paint gunsights and the dials of watches.
That it is ticking through her body, his body,
faster than time. What she has understood
is astonishing enough: the atom, active.
It is as if marbles were found to be breathing out.
As if stones were found to speak.
Sick and stumbling, Pierre is struck
by a cart of military equipage. He passes untouched
under the hooves of six horses. Untouched
between the front wheels, between the turns
of chance and miracle, before six tons
and the back wheel open his skull
and kill him instantly.
Thus closes the deterministic world.
Your coffin was closed and I could see you no more.
I put my head against it.
From the cold contact something like a calm
or intuition came to me.
She does not record him speaking.
That light. She had no way of knowing
it was ionizing radiation, entering the eye,
lighting the eye gel the way a cooling pool is lit
Erin Noteboom: “I started university with a burning desire to study both poetry and physics. Sadly they make you pick, and I picked physics on the grounds that teaching myself about eigenvectors was kind of a tall order. I got all the way to a doctoral program before I realized I was wrong—it’s in poetry that I find my most startling equations. I write poetry and children’s fiction now, and work as a science writer.” (web)
