The Attic

July 2019 | poetry

Tapestries of gossamer

festoon rough-hewn rafters.

Knotty old floorboards

groan under a century’s burden of

memories, dust-coated secrets,

buried shadows in decaying chests,

hearts stilled and gone frigid.

 

A shaft of skittish sunbeams

pierces a grimy window,

spotlighting crazed sepias

of austere gentlemen

in over-starched high collars

and ladies bedecked

in lacy décolletage

and frilly hats, looking

quite prim and proper.

 

In a dank, dusty corner

where the sun never visits

a doll lies long-abandoned,

naked, crumpled, eyes

rolled back in a face

of fractured china.

 

Krikor Der Hohannesian

Krikor Der Hohannesian lives in Medford, MA. His poems have appeared in over 150 literary journals including The Evansville Review, The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review and Natural Bridge. He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of two chapbooks,“Ghosts and Whispers” (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and “Refuge in the Shadows” (Cervena Barva Press, 2013). “Ghosts and Whispers” was a finalist for the Mass Book awards poetry category in 2011.

Drawing session

July 2019 | nonfiction

This story is about drawing my mother’s portrait in a twenty-minute timed session. She is in her late sixties, but I am not sure of her birth year or birthdate. She has changed. She has mellowed out over the years.

Capturing likeness is the aim. She is a willing model. She wants to please. She sits down and I begin. The forehead does not move. Facial muscles around the eyes don’t move. Eyebrows don’t move. They are thick, as they are penciled-in dark.

Eyelids move. Eyeballs move.

Her eyebrows point up; they didn’t before. The end of her eyes where the eyelids meet also point up; they didn’t before. That’s one botched botox job. She is frugal.

Her husband of fifty years wants to leave her. She chewed his ass growing up. He withdrew. She pursued. He withheld.

Old people break up the same way young people do. There is back and forth. There are acts designed to cause jealousy. There is reluctance. There is attraction. There is repulsion.

She lost weight. He lost weight and fixed his teeth. Divorce papers are drawn up, but not filed. Fifty years is a long time.

I am down to her chin now. She has facial hair. She didn’t before. They are bleached but not removed. That double chin can be captured with shading. Time’s up.

 

Hooman Khoshnood

Hooman Khoshnood began his artistic career five years ago, after practicing law for over a decade. He began painting at an early age. But his approach to art-making became more conceptual while studying with Laura LLaneli, a sound art artist, and Marc Larre, a photographer. Mr. Khoshnood was also mentored by Giancarlo Bargoni, a renowned Italian painter in painting and theory. They also explored possible connections between painting and poetry. Mr. Khoshnood continued his studies in art at the Art Students League of New York where his painting “Unknown to me” was published as exemplary student work in the League’s 2017/18 catalog. Mr. Khoshnood obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Doctorate in Law both from the University of Georgia. He is also an avid reader focusing on Linguistics, Literature, and Art History. He was born in Iran and has lived in Iran, Italy, Canada, France, Spain, and the United States. He is fluent in English, Farsi, and Italian. He considers Atlanta home.

Darrell Urban Black

July 2019 | visual art

States of Potential and non-Potentiality

 

Darrell Urban Black

Darrell Urban Black born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Far Rockaway, New York. In high school, he excelled in science with an affinity for outer space. In June 1969, as America fulfilled J. F. Kennedy’s dream to put the American Stars and Stripes into the dusty surface of the moon, his fascination with spaceships grew. As a child, Darrell made spaceship models eventually placing my artistic visions on paper resulting in some 500 drawings. Darrell had many local, national and international group art exhibitions. His artwork is permanently displayed in a number of art galleries, museums and other institutions in America and Germany. Darrell lives in Frankfurt, Germany and continues to draw and paint in pursuit of his artistic dreams. Link http://darrell-black.pixels.com/

Sookoon Ang

July 2019 | visual art

Exorcize Me II

 

Sookoon Ang

Sookoon Ang is an artist living and working in Singapore and Paris. Her work centers around intangibles and their co-existence with the rational world. The artist has consistently and precisely built a body of work produced in response to the transient nature of existence. Her association of seemingly contradictory materials and ideas poetically approaches problems of pictorial space and sculptural presence, often by engaging nuanced but transformative production techniques to create objects at the edges of comprehension. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Palais de Tokyo, Art Basel Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, and Fribourg International Film Festival. Sookoon Ang’s nearly 2 decades long art practice has also provided her the catalyst and milieu for her new feature documentary on the livelihood of contemporary artists which premiered in International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal.

Sunday Morning

July 2019 | nonfiction

It sidles up next to you, standing closer than you like, as usual, with its offering plate.

On top is the lesson you prepared after eleven last night. You and the middle-schoolers will be reading about Jesus busting up the temple.  You like that story, and you think they will also because it comes unexpected. They like you more than you expected, and you like them, too, which is why you teach them On Top of Everything Else.

You have 22 freshman essays to read before Wednesday, including Collin’s, for once.

There’s 57 pages of Dante to read this afternoon if you count the introductory material. You’ve never read Dante—really!—but you assigned it this semester because you felt it was about time you did.

The 30 pages of Derrida and Foucault you have read before, though the truth is that won’t matter with these two. Count on four hours.

Your boys appear before you wearing the burgundy lipstick you bought for the Halloween party last fall.  The lipstick careens beyond the boundaries of their lips.  They look like they have been killing chickens with their teeth.  You should be dismayed—we need to be leaving in three minutes, David announces—but other details keep swarming into your line of vision: the unruly trochees and anapests from last Friday’s failed scansion lesson; Collin arriving fifteen minutes late to class and then peeling an orange, right there in the front row, extending an easy smile as way of apology, his white teeth lined up in disciplined, military rows.

We need to get gas after church, David adds, and we’re out of cereal. The bathroom wastebasket is overflowing—from the corner of your eye the wadded Kleenexes look like anemic peonies cascading across the black mouth of the plunger.

You are certain Collin is still sleeping, and you suspect he might end up enjoying his Sunday more than you will enjoy yours.

Perhaps next week you will decline the descent into Sunday.  Perhaps today you will sit on the front row and write a poem, one free of rhyme or meter, during the sermon—a poem, you admit, no one, save Collin, has time to read.

 

Kristin Van Tassel

Kristin Van Tassel teaches writing and American literature at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. She writes essays and poetry about place, teaching, motherhood, and travel. Her work has appeared in literary, academic, and travel publications, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, World Hum, ISLE, The Journal of Ecocriticism, The Los Angeles Review of Books, About Place, and Temenos.