Laurie Doctor, Every Riven Thing, detail of an eight foot long painting (working with pens made by Alan Ariail)
Brooklyn Flat
Still waiting for cache. And while we do, life amazes us, its stubbornness. To the stains on the porcelain. And yet a fragility too. Our dishwasher broke. And we argued over the broken choke on the truck all the while thinking the sun would stay stuck. Soon, 56 years had passed. And we then realized night had come and gone and we feared we had missed our chance to cleanse our ghosts. But it’s morning and we do our dishes and allow our hands to be alive in the suds as we rub.
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Joe Bisicchia
Review by Paul Jones
“Brooklyn Flat” is never off-key. In short strokes of prose, this piece of writing uses elision to talk about loss and perhaps accommodation through the story of a broken dishwasher. If that’s not domesticality then I don’t know what is.
Review by Jared Pearce
The time-travel here is lots of fun. Were there dishwashers fifty-six years ago? I didn’t bother to look it up because the poem doesn’t rely on the real, it relies on the dreams, attitudes, and desires of the we in the poem, to which the detritus of living is, appropriately, the slave. Of course, the machines are also the time-keepers, the tiny gods that keep track of the years, the minutiae upon which we often gauge our living, our successes. The poem offers no scrubbed Valhalla, only the action, only the work: we have to keep moving if we’re going to get beyond the stuff.