ISSUE NO. 20: ELEGY
April 2024
This issue of Pearl Press features work from:
Cover image: Amanda BernSohn
Curated by: Delilah Twersky
Download the PDF below.
Mel Driving: Amanda BernSohn
PLACES I'VE BEEN WITH MY FATHER: Kaitlyn Yates
PLACES I'VE BEEN WITH MY FATHER: Kaitlyn Yates
The Lodge: Will Baldwin
Preserved Presence: Colleen Fox Breen
CLOCKS
How was I to know that the living
room of clocks told different times?
I learned how to fold a fortune teller
at my grandparents’ coffee table.
I sat cross-legged on the shag carpet,
my sister on the recliner, the couch empty.
The grandfather clock sang its song
down the hall, dinner, but I could not
Read its hands, only folded scratch
paper with promises I prayed to.
Grandmother collected clocks, antique
and analog; four on every wall.
My grandfather died on the empty
couch next to the coffee table.
I saw him in his last days, unable
to turn his head towards mine.
My grandmother told me he asked
god for more time in his sleep.
The grandfather clock still sings,
and I still do not know the time.
Courtney Heidorn
Thomas: Naomi Liechty
Untitled: Nic Anselmo
Pursed: Nanci Milton Fitterman
DO GRAPEFRUITS GROW ABOVE GROUND?
I remember the earth
being tart and pink,
with the wind shuddering
around my shoulders
like a shot dog; run over
with so many rememberings
that the memory begins to bruise.
So many empty breaths I didn’t want
to take. So many hands looking for God
inside of me. Digging into the rotten tree
with cut up fingers. Where have you been,
my Lord? Where does god go when
I’m sleeping and my mother is in the next room,
being killed? Her blood down the drain
like sun into grass. I remember
the man who killed my mother
trying to wrestle a seed into the ground
and how I begged for God to swallow him
whole. Take his salted eyes, take his sagging shoulders,
take his woes and his troubles; grow a tree
I can remember. So that, one day, I can memorize
the curves and the color of the bark and
the sap on my jeans can be a memory
that is not a memory because it never dies.
Not here, not in the Louisiana heat, not
in the country that taught my mother
the way of burying her body above ground.
Jude Armstrong
Cyclamen #17: Julie Fowells
Water: Naomi Liechty
A DISAPEARING ACT
175 pounds even (on a good day)
does not look like it should when
measured in cellophane candies
in carnations lip gloss rose quartz in a pocket
in earrings sunshine lazy susans in the yard
in ivy street signs empty bottles of wine
technicolor time-killers meant to be
only two things: briefly enjoyed and
entirely gone
slumped against the wall with the legs
sticking out, slouched like a gangly child
there is the ghost of a person in that hot
white corner, and he’s the brightest thing
in the room
encouraged to take, unsure if you should
the becoming is born from the loss, a
honeyed paradox ever-adjusting— a
bit to the left. then fall out of sight. 175
even (healthy weight for an adult man)
the pile is a portrait and
the pile is dwindling and
the pile is whole again and
the pile is called ross. a
memoir by a man who had to watch
as people stole pieces heedless of the
disappearing act they created, the only
art in the gallery they want you to steal,
a grieving man’s tiny agony,
and if a perfect likeness takes
your place did anything really change
at all? count out the people who would
be able to tell the difference. wonder
if you are one of them.
taste pink gold green (a beating heart)
know you are taking and becoming
(all at once).
Grace McGory
Five Decades on the Coast: Elizabeth Hopkins
First and Final Winter: Will Baldwin
1976: Elizabeth Hopkins
Preserved Presence: Colleen Fox Breen
Moonrise, Brooklyn: Amanda BernSohn
COONAMESSETT
In memory of my grandmother on the third anniversary of her passing.
You left some notes I stumbled across
I don’t know if they were meant for me.
A few iterations each they said,
When you see a sunset, think of me.
So westward I have tacked my gaze, but
alas, how mystified I have been -
nothing reminds me of you so well
as the way the moldering foyer smells at The Coonamessett Inn.
A foyer no bigger than a phone booth, but
big enough to be the musty waiting room
for the next life. I thought for a moment I
found you here in eternity’s anteroom.
For a moment - dead in my tracks - I thought,
let this be the next life I’ve stumbled into
and let me see your burnished red head bobbing
up from the parking lot and into view.
Come, come into the vestibule beside me
and tell me it smells like home did even in
a puritanical Podunk town like this
where you never would have been caught dead in –
but caught you were and dead you are, and I don’t
get to choose what reminds me of you. I wish
it was more to phone home to you about than
some lacquered wood, but then I realize this:
You’re not a sunset distant.
You’re alive here in this room.
The smell does more than remind
me, it resurrects you in
this place you’ve never seen, never been to
our wedding rehearsal dinner venue.
Here I was, thinking you would miss it.
Here you are, waiting for me
at the front door of the Coonamessett.
Ava Mack
Suz 2: Naomi Liechty
Moon: Naomi Liechty
Untitled, Hotel: Amanda BernSohn
ELEGY FOR EINSTEIN'S BRAIN
My founding father / Albert Einstein / ground zero for me
For him that was Ulm / Final Destination New Jersey / where his brain was stolen by the pathologist despite the stipulation that it should not be studied / for Einstein was not fond of fanboys / whose fervent adoration might find reason to keep his body parts as souvenirs / a relic for the Church of Science
The pathologist’s wife was grossed out / by the human remains in the pantry / she said she’d deep-six the brain / if he didn’t move it by a given deadline / careful what you wish for, the pathologist’s ex-wife / if you think you can compare / to Nobel Prize Laureate Albert Einstein
For thirty years the thief kept the brain / segmented into two-hundred-and-forty parts / rehomed into two jars / pickled in cellulose / in a cinder box / under a beer cooler / in a basement / in the American mid-west
His neighbour & friend William S. Burroughs / in gross misconduct of his professional duties / never wrote a single poem about it / and wasted words in poetic malpractice / bragging to his buddies about it / Einstein’s brain / in the pathologist’s ex-wife’s ex-husband’s basement / just next door from him
The thief took the brain to California / where all celebrities end up dead or alive / there was a study / most findings were discredited / for lack of academic rigour / but the fascinating conclusion that stands was that / Einstein’s brain was in fact / abnormally large.
Beatriz Seelaender
Thank you for reading.
For more updates check @pearl.press on Instagram.
Delilah Twersky
Pearl Press
©2024