Author’s Note: When my parents were dying and thereafter, the poems I read about loss used particular metaphors, and columns about mental health suggested cultivating everyday gratitude, especially during difficult times. I found myself wondering why they left me feeling such a void within. Why did certain words bother me? Why did the notion that everyday gratitude would ground me seem so misplaced? I wrote Unyielding Love in response.

Unyielding Love

Poetry, do not give me words like these:
bittersweet, brambles, barren;
thorns, vines, terrain. Or these:
light, stars, moon;
burgeoning, birth, deliverance;
soothe, navigate, praise. 

Nothing that signals that, since you understand,
you have a suggestion, an answer even:
All I need to do is follow, is believe,
is open my eyes, is be astounded
by your life/my life/life,
is accept that your wisdom
can replenish the—
not this word either—vessel
that I am.

Also, not gratitude—as in,
gratitude will anchor you. 

I have seen, as if in a mirror on a curve,
that what is coming
is not stoppable.
May, in fact, be a beginning.

Today, I finished with soups and teas,
with clean sheets and towels and antiseptic wipes;
with nighttime waking and dosage schedules,
with ice packs and heating pads,
with reverent awe.

What I have witnessed is what anchors me.
Her last breaths. His open eyes, not reflecting.
And what filled me with the peace
I think you mean when you say, gratitude,
was caring for them, was believing
that unyielding love was power.
It is a cloud with nothing left
below to water or shield. 

♦ 

Catherine DeNunzio’s poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from The Robert Frost Place, Connecticut River Review, Italian Americana, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Scapegoat Review, and Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. Her chapbook, Enough Like Bone to Build On (Antrim House), was released in 2022. Website: www.instagram.com/catherinedenunziopoetry 

The Delmarva Review, a literary journal, reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with an electronic edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: I titled the poem “Helen to Euripides” because in Euripides’ play, “The Trojan Women,” I was struck by a scene where the mother of Paris is blaming Helen and saying, in effect, we should just kill her. Helen strides in and says, how is this my fault? That indignant strength, despite her lack of power, relative to the men around her, inspired me to let her tell her own story.

Helen to Euripides

My face didn’t launch a thousand ships; men did.
Zeus was my father, and, swan-like my mother
Raped, doing her great honor. When I was
Just seven, another honor, Theseus
Stole me from my playroom. Old, fat, he held
Me down beneath his paunch til I could bear
His child. Then kings of Greece abducted me
In turns, so to possess some beautiful
Thing, ‘til proud Odysseus declared: Why
Should this divide us? Let her decide which
Shall have her. I almost chose him but feared
A man whose power was to mystify minds,
When Menelaus, simple and strong, could promise
Enough bronze spears to end my endless passage
From king to king. End it did, ended til
Paris princeling from careless goddess bought
Me with an envied apple, my husband three,
My second noble thief, coward who took me
Into his Trojan bed as payment made!
Greek kings to Anatolian shores brought war
In turn—and better men than Paris died
(Like Hector, the sole Trojan who never wished
Me dead). When that poor warrior tried to fight,
Eternal Aphrodite had to save my husband three
From under husband two’s bronze blade and whisked
Him from that dusty field to silken bed.
I would have spurned his princely prick, but fair
Goddess demanded I make homage to it.
When Ilium’s towers fell, before my husband
Two could return his prize to Spartan bed,
I heard Odysseus’ remark, our trade
will flourish once we colonize these shores.
Now, beside once proud Menelaus, again
I sit. Now nightly, I nepenthe add
To watered wine to stop the weeping that
Afflicts him when the ghosts invariably
Appear. Content, at last, I reign, a stately
Achaean Queen of quiet, broken kings.

♦

Christopher Honey is an MFA candidate at the University of Saint Thomas. His poetry, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Rumpus, the Decadent Review, Vita Poetica, the Pomona Valley Review, the Building Trades News, and Montgomery Living Magazine. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and daughter.

The Delmarva Review, a literary journal, reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with an electronic edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: I had a lot of fun writing this poem, playing with the idea of time as not just an abstract backdrop to our changing lives, but an actual teacher in whose classroom we learn and grow, and from whose care we eventually depart. As I wrote, she really came to life for me: a little flakey, a lot of fun, weirdly sentimental (she truly misses those trilobites!) and possessing a highly eccentric sense of humor (boy does she find Shakespeare’s sonnets hilarious, but why? only she knows).

Time The Teacher

was often late for class, would arrive
with her keys, her plums, her unwritten
poems, makeup spilling from 

her hobo bag of exasperations;
rarely took attendance except
with sometimes sudden and alarming

urgency (a panicked mother
shouting runaway names
in the grocery parking lot);

always seemed to call on you
when you weren’t paying attention;
snorted at every request for extra credit.

Wore her graying hair up in a girlish
ponytail, and her bifocals on a chain
around her neck. Graded our papers

in disappearing ink; often digressed;
thought little of the Bible, or Americans,
(except for Dickinson); seemed to enjoy

scandalizing us with casual details from
old exploits: Byron, Picasso, Kahlo,
and others too numerous to mention, though

mention them she did (gasps when
she winked yes for Bieber); dropped
the c-word like she was dropping

all pretense. Said wisdom wasn’t
worth much more than sheer pluck;
kept a pickle jar of sand on her desk

and asked us to guess how many
grains it held; always knew
when it was your birthday and

brought cupcakes. Sobbed dis-
concertingly during presentations
on dinosaurs and trilobites, and the

Cambrian explosion. But laughed
through our recitals of Shakespeare’s
sonnets: “oh my god, stop it, you’re

killing me!” she’d groan at That Time
of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold,
pounding her fist on the desk, holding 

her sides, the clock on the wall not
budging an inch till she was done.

♦

Julian Koslow is a former professor of Renaissance literature at Virginia Tech but left academia to take care of a child with special needs. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The Columbia Review, SRPR, Cumberland River Review, New Ohio Review, and Atlanta Review. He lives with his wife and two sons in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.

The Delmarva Review, a literary journal, reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with an electronic edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

#  #  #

 

Editor’s Note: Mia Mazzeo’s essay is the winner of the Talbot County High School-Talbot Arts-Delmarva Review Youth Writing Scholarship. The award was funded by a grant from Talbot Arts and included a writing mentorship with one of the journal’s editors, publication of the student’s prose in the Delmarva Review, and a financial award. 

Author’s Note: I’ve been a cinephile for a few years now, so I started writing this essay to pinpoint where exactly my love for movies began. Telling this story ended up being a very introspective experience, allowing me to reflect both on how much I’ve grown since my parent’s divorce and how film has significantly impacted my life. Movies allow us to form amazing connections and express ourselves in so many beautiful ways, and for those reasons, the silver screen will always hold a special place in my heart.

 

Movies and Moving

THE STAIRS of the apartment building creaked whenever I climbed them, no matter how I moved or where my feet fell. I learned this after a few times. The perpetually damp wooden boards, covered in mossy splotches and splinters, were far older than me. On the day I took that first step, however, I was not focused on the stairs’ rickety noises but on the world that was crumbling around them. 

Nobody tells you what it’s like visiting the other “home” for the first time after your parents get divorced. For me, that place was my father’s new apartment. Its pale-yellow walls and scratchy tan carpet made the rooms feel surreal, like I was entering a new dimension when I walked through the door. The unfamiliarity drifting through the air that first day was asphyxiating, tightening my throat, and making my eyes well with tears. I had sworn to myself that I was not going to cry. 

But standing there, in the middle of my father’s new apartment, my head began to fill with a dark, billowing storm. The news of my parents’ divorce, while expected, had never felt real to me before. Not when I noticed my father’s wedding ring was missing the day the split was announced, not even when he moved out a month later. But on that stifling June day, in a strange and sweltering apartment, a sense of anxiety overwhelmed me. The pounding in my ears grew louder—harsh thunder to my clouded, aching mind. A million questions pelted me like hard rain, but one stood out above the others: Was it all because of me? 

My father stopped me as I shuffled to my new room, backpack in hand, filled with just enough clothes and items to show I was “moving in.” I was never that close with him. He worked often and was gone for days at a time. The divorce only added to the distance, as we both became more reserved, talking infrequently and exchanging only small talk. My father, sensing my unease that first day, asked if I wanted to go to the movies the next time I came over. Back then, going to the movies was a rare occurrence. But I always enjoyed it, even if we would only go once or twice a year. My father’s offer was a golden opportunity that I hoped would distract my distressed mind, so I agreed to go. 

After that day, every time I walked into the movie theater with my father, I could not help but grin. We had begun a habit of seeing a movie whenever I visited the apartment, and I always looked forward to going. While it may have started as a simple distraction, it evolved into a beloved weekly tradition. 

There were so many little things I loved about our trips: stopping to look at the movie posters while walking into the theater, getting a big bucket of popcorn, and relaxing in the cozy chairs of the front row, which we had both boldly deemed to be the best seats in the whole theater. What my father loved most were the trailers. When a movie looked good, he would lean over and whisper that we had to see it right when it came out. He never failed to add that last part, which always made me smile. It meant that our ritual would continue, and we’d be rushing to the theater together again. 

What I loved most were our conversations after the movie. I would talk on and on about the characters and the writing, never even pausing to breathe. We would discuss every minute detail about the film and laugh all the way back to the apartment, a place I genuinely began to enjoy. Each trip brought serenity, I was never upset or anxious, and all my stress melted away with the rolling of the opening credits. Gradually, as the weeks went on, movies became one of the most important parts of my life, and with them so did my father. In our own coded language, we’d found a way to talk about things that mattered, shaped by the lives of movie characters. 

Then he moved hours away to be with his new wife, and our trips became a thing of the past. With a busy schedule filled with school, sports, and clubs, it became progressively more difficult for me to go see him. Our visits dwindled to a few days a year. But he could still visit me, my mother declared. A familiar gloom returned with this thought. I knew he would never be at my door holding movie tickets or popcorn because he was too busy with the life he was living far from me. I felt the rain return—a sad drizzle. Was it all because of me? 

I used to think so, but I don’t anymore. Many things in life happen out of our control, just like the weather. But even the most inclement days can feed our dreams. 

Through these showers, there was always a constant, a seed nurtured by rain into something beautiful: my love for movies, a love that has grown into an immense fascination with all things film. Now, I can spend hours dissecting screenwriting—from learning the rhythm of dialogue to studying the perfect way to build tension. Whenever I find myself caught up in swirling cinema lights, it brings me the same peace I had once felt with my father. Watching movies is like a time machine, sending me back to the dim theater I shared with him, fond memories playing any time I see the big screen. 

The vines of film reel have pulled me from darkness and made me more resilient than I was that first day in my father’s new apartment. Film and writing have fostered my creativity, giving me a positive outlet to share my thoughts and feelings with the world—sunshine on the face of a once closed-off girl. 

♦ 

Mia Mazzeo, a junior at Easton High School, is the recipient of  the Talbot County High School-Talbot Arts-Delmarva Review Youth Writing Scholarship (2023), with funding from a grant from Talbot Arts and supported by Talbot County Schools. The awarded student collaborates with one of the review’s editors to finalize the original prose for publication. The high school scholarship and mentoring initiative encourages outstanding writing among students in regional schools. Mazzeo is a member of the National Honors Society, Latin Honor Society, Latin club, Interact club, and Yearbook club. She is from St. Michaels, Maryland.

The Delmarva Review, a literary journal, reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with an electronic edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem is a rather straight forward account of early spring gardening, the tension between what is “good” and “bad” (slugs, weeds), and the sometimes endlessness of the tasks, resulting in a retreat from that burden only to come inside and find nature has made its way in with the ants which are seemingly impossible creatures to get rid of. 

Day Before Easter

I pull the weeds, one
after another and another
as Sisyphus might
Why shouldn’t the weeds live, too?
Such fortitude and strange beauty. 

Two eagles circle above. No crows
are pestering them. Tell the rabbits
to beware. Don’t the slugs deserve
to slither among the damp leaves,
leaving their eerie trails?
Sometimes I cut, sometimes I fling. 

It’s messy.
No wonder we need sleep.
I moved some tiny ferns down
to the bottom of the yard. I
can only hope they flourish
in the shade of the hawthorn. 

A cold rain begins and I
retreat. That’s enough nature.
I watch from the window—rain,
birds, bowing trees and look,
down at the baseboard, churning,
the ants are back, the damn ants. 

♦ 

Mercedes Lawry’s most recent book is Vestiges, from Kelsay Books. She has published three chapbooks and poems in other journals, including Nimrod and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her book Small Measures is forthcoming from ELJ Editions, Ltd., in 2024. Her work has been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize. She has also published short stories and poems for children. Lawry lives in Seattle, Washington. 

As a literary journal, the Delmarva Review reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print, with a  digital edition, to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. It’s a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee. The review is available from major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

 

Author’s Note: “Lots of works of art, traditionally, have expected their consumers to play a particular role in their appreciation. I was interested in looking at the reactions to paintings of some more marginalized and unexpected readers and having a little fun with some of the more liminal states that this might involve. Various kinds of appreciation have always overlapped but I like the idea of looking into the gaps between these.”

Art

I WAS BECOMING THE KIND OF MAN who is always between things. Other people saw me like that I knew, and I was beginning to see it myself. I was between jobs, lovers, places to live. Even when I had a job, a girlfriend, an address, these situations were so obviously stopgaps that I still felt temporary and was regarded as such. I was on the way to somewhere else that felt like anywhere else. I was running out of things I wanted and accumulating things I wanted to avoid.

I had always thought that time was my friend. No matter how dull the day it could come only once, and it ticked away unfailingly second by second. Now even that was changing. I had thought of going home for a while, to my parents’ house, but my mother already had an unwelcome guest in the form of a tumor in her stomach, not to mention my borderline crazy father. Crazier than ever now with anxiety and guilt, anguish, and fright. Time was preparing a Chamber of Horrors for me there, and I was not keen to meet that evil halfway.

Some people, and this is a while ago, had thought I was an artist or was going to be one. I may have been of this opinion myself. It was not the case. Art had been a faith for me once and then a plan; now it seemed merely a theme. I had been a novice painter, an art student, an art history student, and now I worked in a museum with an art gallery, an administrative post, not my first of this nature. I had thought this kind of thing would be congenial, undemanding, like-minded company, and it was not badly paid. I was almost a civil servant. Trouble was, no one would talk to me. I was too undoubtedly transient. My presence was almost subliminal. My colleagues, if we have to call them that, often couldn’t see me; they were so sure I would not be there the next time they turned around. And to make it worse, I had tried to talk to them about art. That was the last thing that any of them had wanted to discuss, like it was a shameful secret. They as good as lived in an art gallery. They found me absurd. Now I knew they referred to me as The Aesthete when I wasn’t there, which I planned to be very soon.

So, I had a number of insoluble problems that I simply had to endure. I could take a holiday from them, though, go somewhere pleasant where there was no point in thinking about them for an interlude. I am, of course, talking about the pub. Friday after work, time for a drink. I was feeling unusually tired, but I generally perk up after a pint or two. I didn’t even avoid the place where they all went. I wasn’t shy, I didn’t mind being snubbed, I wasn’t embarrassed by it. When I walked in and saw just how empty the place was, however,—I had now been snubbed to the extent that everyone had gone somewhere else and not told me—I turned round to walk out again, until I saw the open door like the frame around a winter’s night, a wholly black picture. I imagined stepping down into a pool brimming with oil, a substance so opaque as to suggest that there was nothing there at all, and I thought that was what my mother was looking at, the door she would inevitably have to walk through, and I stepped up to the bar. 

I put my elbow on it and was soon taking my first taste. I think I understood why they wouldn’t talk to me about art, but I still hated them for it. I had known a woman once who had been brought up in Florence, and she resented living in what she thought of as a museum of Renaissance architecture instead of a city. I told her, We have art so that we will not die of the truth. That was the sort of thing that I said in those days. She didn’t look as impressed as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t look as though the truth would kill her either. Venice would be worse. I had never met anyone who lived in Venice. Did anyone? That Philistinism though, not so easy to forgive. I took a longer drink. A lot of it was brainless indifference, but chiefly it was boredom. The gallery’s collection of local artists and a few muddy minor works dubiously attributed to more significant painters did not speak to them, as those people did not speak to me. Each in his several worlds.

I was wondering how long I might stay, whether I should push off in search of some company, when I saw Colak sitting on his own and staring at an empty glass. This could have been a reason to leave as much as one to sit down with this known curmudgeon. Colak was one of our attendants—what I insisted on calling the guards, mischievously—the most senior of them, at least in the sense of being the oldest. He had a difficult accent, an even more difficult attitude, and definitely insufficient funds to drink all Friday night as he had started so early. He hadn’t seen me, or if he had, he offered no encouragement to come over. I could have looked the other way.

I had shaken his hand once before and remembered being surprised at just how cold his grasp was. The other impression I got from him was that he was a drinker. His face looked purple in the gallery’s harsh light, with a shiny cracked glaze. In the pub he was greener. Several gold teeth. Some of my colleagues considered him altogether mad. He had a way when he was talking with you that was unique to himself, twisting his head around and looking high above you as though he had suddenly noticed something that could be seen through a hole in the ceiling. He would also make remarks, apparently unmotivated conversational stabs, the point of which was, to say the least, oblique. I didn’t mind this. I could see he was unusual, but I didn’t think Colak was mad. Not dangerously so, anyway. He smelled of dust, and he whistled too much. It occurred to me that if I went and sat down next to him on his bench and let my shoulders slump like his, we would be something out of Degas, though neither of us had the hats for it. 

I bought him one of what I was having and put it down beside his empty glass. He raised an eyebrow and winked at me. He said nothing, but he took a delicate sip. The sign of a man who knows how to make a drink last.

We sat there in silence until the landlord, I assume, turned off the music and a violinist began tuning up. He was obviously going to cruise the tables looking for tips. I knew that this happened sometimes. Colak and I exchanged weary glances. Actually, he was pretty good. He played Stardust then something else, then Girls Just Want To Have Fun. There were no girls in this pub so far as I could see because the violinist was right—they do just want to have fun. He wasn’t having a lot of luck with the tips, so he started on something a bit more gypsy, probably for his own satisfaction, and then something related to that but more sophisticated. I said, without really considering who I was talking to,

“I think that’s—”

“Bartók,” Colak completed my guess.

Then he told me, which I already knew, that Bartók had often incorporated gypsy airs into his own compositions. I bought him another drink on the strength of this. He performed a gesture, a dip of the head, a lift of the shoulder, which concisely conveyed the fact that he was grateful for this drink but also that he was not in a position to buy me one back. I didn’t care. I didn’t mind paying for a little Bartók chat. Besides, what else could I do, buy one for myself and let him watch me drink it? 

Colak said he was Ruthenian. He just came out with that. I have to say that he kept a straight face through all of what follows, and I remain largely unaware of the extent of his capacity for holding his drink and of his inclination to pull my leg. I had heard of Ruthenia. I thought maybe Andy Warhol’s family had emigrated from there, but I wasn’t sure about that. I thought it must have been one of those Balkan countries or ethnographic areas that had disappeared with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, melting like ice cubes at the bottom of a glass. Disappeared, but obviously still there. Like all of those places, even the Soviet Union now, they sound like ideas for countries rather than homes where you could actually have lived out your life. Anyway, I gave Colak the benefit of the doubt, and that was enough to start him talking, telling a story that he had apparently never told anyone before. 

In Ruthenia, before the war, he had been doing this same job, working as an attendant in the capital’s national art gallery. This was also part of the palace, the home of the royal family, and as such, only technically open to the public during the infrequent national holidays. Colak described it as a dignified late eighteenth-century building containing an indifferent collection of poorly curated work. Mostly bad pictures with a few minor masterpieces accidentally acquired by the scattershot collecting strategies of those royal family members who took the occasional unpredictable interest in such things. Nothing properly cleaned. Some of the better pictures may, in fact, have been copies, the originals sold off to pay the debts of dissipation.

I had thought for a moment that I was going to find myself sitting next to a claimant to the Ruthenian throne, but it was nothing as hackneyed as that. He had been in his position for a matter of months, long enough to get an idea of the collection and the ramshackle way in which it was cared for, when the Ruthenian revolution broke out. Colak forgave me for not having heard of the Ruthenian revolution because, as he said, it was almost immediately quashed, not through the intervention of Austrian cavalry but by the outbreak of the war. It was on page one for a day then Franz Ferdinand was shot. Was it even a revolution or merely a night of misrule? It was certainly at least the latter. The palace was invaded by rioters and, to some degree, looted. Oil paintings, frames firmly bolted to stone walls, were not obvious targets for casual theft, but the gallery was the scene of considerable revelry. The insurgents, perhaps, did not so much want to steal from the gallery, or to vandalize it, but to take charge of it. At any rate, things got out of hand when the brandy started to flow, as things will.

Colak found telling his story thirsty work, and I made several trips to the bar while he was doing it. I even inquired for Ruthenian brandy, that’s how implausible things were getting, and came back with the dregs of some evil green liquor that had been at the back of a shelf for a very long time. Undrinkable, but we drank it.

So, Colak and a couple of his fellow custodians, who had become fond of the collection and cared about it, ventured in holding their breath a day or maybe two days after the palace had been attacked. A number of the rebels were still in occupation, but they were not hostile, not unfriendly, mostly badly hungover. Colak and his friends had not turned up in uniform.

Now the next part is the start of what is really difficult to believe. I wasn’t sure what Colak was trying to tell me at first; he had not been so easy to understand even at the start of the evening. I thought perhaps there was something idiomatic or metaphorical I wasn’t really getting. He said that the rebels had fallen into the paintings.

The first man they spoke to was sitting in a painting as though the bottom of the frame had been a narrow bench, or he was a naughty boy sitting on a step. They thought, initially, that he had torn through the canvas, perhaps even broken through the wall, and was sitting in the cavity that he had made. But this was not so, not possible. I am remembering this from quite some time ago, and I am by no means sure that I can faithfully reproduce what Colak actually told me. This man was sitting in the picture, and it seemed to have closed around him. Closed around him like a healed wound, Colak said, whatever that might mean. The picture was a tall portrait of a man in casual hunting dress, but bewigged, holding a rifle and with a few liver-spotted hounds moving around his feet, the dogs the most lovingly painted features. A familiar period formula. The rebel had his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, and was weeping torrentially. All they could get him to say was, “Hush the dogs, for God’s sake hush the dogs,” over and over. Needless to say, they could hear no dogs.

Colak was then called away by another man. This fellow was sitting on the floor still drinking from what appeared to be his personal supply of wine bottles, but one of his arms had disappeared, almost up to the shoulder in the flooded water meadow of a Rubenesque landscape as though he had put his arm into the water in the hope of fishing something out of it. The river was now flowing around his missing, or invisible, arm. Black and white cows were drinking in their desultory manner in the shallows caused by the flood. Painted walkers had moved away from the riverbank to avoid this inundation. The poor man’s shoulder and much of his chest were soaked, and there was a pool of water in which he was more or less sitting that did not bear investigation.

We had got to a point in Colak’s relation when it was clear to him that, in a manner of speaking, I was believing him, or at least that I seemed to be, so I was able to confer with him about what had happened, what fantastic thing. We agreed that the surface of the paintings had somehow become permeable, alive even. A barrier had been dissolved, the paintings had opened, and this had perhaps been made possible by the qualities of revolution, the onset of that terrible war, the assassination of a prince, the failure of an empire. And then this moment had passed, whatever had brought it about during that ill-considered bacchanal. The world had become molten, but then it had cooled and hardened again, as hard as glass. The window had closed. I had never previously been taken with the idea that fine art had much revolutionary potential. Now, here was a revolution characterized not by rivers of blood, parched ocean beds, and falling stars, a species of Apocalypse, but by tasteless practical jokes. We had another drink.

When I got back to him, Colak was saying that there were still a lot of people in the gallery. Some of these had passed out, but others were walking around and admiring the paintings, pointing out interesting or puzzling features to one another, some holding their own hands behind their backs as though very relaxed in imitation of the connoisseur or waiting to be handcuffed. Colak gave me a tour now of this grotesque exhibition. I think he may have been getting carried away, and he did appear to be enjoying himself. I wanted more, definitely. Young as I was, I had been longing for consolation, for something to persuade me that things were not exactly as they looked. I had been feeling that my best years were behind me already. Time drops on us all like a shadow. That’s a quotation. Like everything else. But now there were new things in the world.

A bench had been shifted so that its end was flush against another full-length portrait, this time of a young woman in a beautiful turquoise silk dress painted in the precioso style. A man was lying on this bench with his head and shoulders pressed into the canvas. You would have thought he had been beheaded, bloodlessly. Otherwise, you would have thought he had been attempting to look up the dress of this girl, possibly, in fact, a courtesan, one of the old Duke’s favorites, and the painting had healed around him once more, trapping him in this ludicrous and indecorous pose. Was he dead? Suffocated? Colak couldn’t say. He did say that the courtesan, her color heightened, wore a certain smile she had never worn before and, as a result, was now the subject of a far superior painting. Formerly the young woman, with an ostrich feather dyed blue in her preposterously ungainly hat, which looked like it might blow away at any moment, and inexpertly clutching an early form of guitar, had simply looked very, very bored.

Colak told me it was not possible to verify subtle changes to the paintings, for the gallery’s catalog, such as it was, contained written descriptions of a perfunctory nature and only the world’s major museums sold picture postcards in those days.

He gave me more examples, but his coherence and the intelligibility of his accent, not to mention my powers of recollection, had been seriously undermined by now. He said there was a clumsy copy of Goya’s firing squad, which seemed to have more dead bodies than had been the case. He tried to count them and couldn’t. He spoke about counting at one point during the evening, and it must have been here. He said that he still knew about numbers, at least knew the names of numbers, but he could not put them in order nor even imagine what order was. Knowing the names of the numbers was like knowing the names of animals or flowers. 

I wanted to ask my new friend if he was being entirely straight with me. After all, on the day of the revolution, if you had been a young man in his position, wouldn’t you? You would have gone in there, wouldn’t you, to protect what you had come to love, maybe to protect it by taking it home. I felt that I knew him well enough now, certainly I had bought him enough booze, to put this to him.

His accent thickened further, and he began to move his hands around the many glasses and bottles on our table, straightening things and setting the fallen back on their feet. Before this, he had been economical with his movements. And he began to talk about a little painting by Kandinsky, or in his manner, quite early, very beautiful, more phantasmagorical than geometrical, an oil of delicate color, pastel orange and a summer-sky blue, figures of great elegance, fluid intestinal swirls impossible to describe, altogether out of keeping with the staple portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre paintings of the collection as a whole. It was a fascinating riddle. You couldn’t look away from it, but that was all you could do. It accused your imagination. Intimidated it.

I knew then, in a way that I cannot say that I know now, that Colak, at some unspecified moment, had dared to put his head into that painting and that this explained everything about him that was not right.

He maundered on about fruit stolen from a still life. A leather bag of coins, its unknown and unspendable currency scattered across the gallery floor. A loaf of bread and a lemon unaccountably just there and which no one would touch. A dead hare. I thought he was avoiding my questions. I was asking about what had happened to the men. How were they relieved? Could they be? They could escape from these nightmares only if they woke up, but that was impossible as they were not asleep. They would open their eyes wide and try to blink themselves into wakefulness, or they would try to fall asleep in the hope of waking later once more in the sane world that they had formerly known. They might have died and remained attached to the paintings as three-dimensional memento mori sculptures. A skeleton looking up the skirt of a courtesan. Not bad. 

He told me of a man, all the invaders seem to have been men, who had lain down next to a naked Venus and turned into her body as though it were a great pink pillow. He seemed all right. Asleep. Perhaps she had looked after him. 

I asked him directly what had happened to the gallery and to its pictures, and he told me that the next day he had slipped over the border into the modern world, having saved what he could. I knew of the rumor that he had given something to the gallery in which we both now worked and that that had secured his permanent employment and other emoluments, despite his evident uselessness.

I had to pay a quick visit. It wasn’t that quick in the end, and I did disgrace myself to some degree. Anyway, when I came back, Colak was gone, and even the table had been cleared, and a young couple was sitting there holding hands. I had not imagined this whole thing. When I stepped outside, the cold hit me in the face like a bag of hammers.

I did see him again, in his usual place, not the next working day but in the week that followed. We never spoke about Ruthenia and all that business. He liked to sit where he could look at a neat little Gainsborough. A group of male musicians playing flutes. Full-length portrayals but small, as though the men were puppets. Maybe this picture had been Colak’s gift. The landscape behind the three men was a mere theatrical backdrop, not at all the real countryside. 

I amuse myself sometimes by pretending that painted figures might have escaped from the Ruthenian canvases and entered our world as angels and Greek gods used to do. They took a chance on giving up the privilege of immortality in dubious exchange for freedom and had been trying to find a place for themselves, to fit in, ever since. When Colak said he was from Ruthenia… And maybe the rebels, some of them, had entered the painted world entirely, not content to be half in and half out. They would be wandering there still like the isolated little figures in De Chirico’s deserted worlds, the only captives in a prison the size of a city. Troubling pictures, fantasies of underpopulation, the beginning, or, more likely, the end of things, private and solitary, as lonely as dreams. 

It soon came time for me to move on again and I left these questions behind me, as you do. 

♦

Robert Stone’s stories have been published in British, American, Asian, and Canadian magazines, including: 3:AM, Stand, Panurge, Eclectica, Confingo, Punt Volat, HCE, Wraparound South, Lunate, Decadent Review, the Nightjar chapbook series and elsewhere. His “micro-stories” have appeared in 5×5, Third Wednesday, Star 82, Ocotillo Review, deathcap. A story is included in Salt’s Best British Stories, 2020. He is a British author born in Wolverhampton, U.K. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. 

As a literary journal, the Delmarva Review reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print, with a digital edition, to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. It’s a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee. The review is available from the major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: “Fisherman Blues” is part of a collection of sonnets about the North Sea and the English Channel. They developed during several summers that I spent on the Belgian coast in the city of Ostend and in Northern France in economically declining fishing towns like Boulogne-Sur-Mer during and in the wake of Brexit. The poem takes the perspective of one of the North Sea’s most contested assets, fish, and repeats a one syllable Sanskrit mantra ‘hrim’ pronounced ‘hreem’. Like the mantra ‘om’ it reflects unity, oneness, and shared wisdom—both lost to humans and nation-states focused on territorializing coastal waters. The poem’s title and closing couplet reflect the despair and deprivation in once thriving seaside fishing communities caused by neglectful governments, but the last line suggests that there is hope for renewal. 

Fisherman Blues

Trawling through unclaimed waters,
before Her Majesty’s court jesters in waiting
(for a referendum) can ask: can a fish be British, Belgian,
French or Dutch? Fluent in Flounder, Carp or Cod?

Fish know the answer—swimming unbounded through
shoreless seas. They share the same syllable: hrim
which ripples through undelineated waters until
fishermen, hot on its trail, trawl a line in the sea. 

Once the war has broken and treaties drawn
only then do the fishermen know the wisdom of
their prey. Ocean is to sea as sea is to river as
river is to rain. The tacit law of hrim carried by wind.

Your empty nets and bank accounts. Fallow towns and
empty market stalls. The day you learned to hum hrim.

♦

Sara Atwater grew up in Washington, D.C. She completed a BA in German and English at UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in education from the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. She taught secondary school English for fifteen years. Currently, Atwater is working on a PhD at Maastricht University (Netherlands). She lives in Brussels, Belgium with her partner and their two children. 

As a literary journal, the Delmarva Review reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print, with a digital edition, to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. It’s a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee. The review is available from the major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: My father was raised to keep secrets about his family’s past. He would never tell stories, even about his own childhood. But in Mexico, my own family was able to visit two elderly ladies who called themselves our “grandmother-aunts”—daughters of my great grandfather, who had married a much younger Mexican woman. “The Life of Secrets” celebrates their generosity and my admiration for that branch of our family.

The Life of Secrets

My father taught me not to poke at hidden things.
The tough questions, I saved for strangers.
Once, on TV, I saw a pantomime— 

Red Skelton played an astronaut,
spacewalking. Severed from his ship,
he floated off into darkness. 

I’m bolder now. Maybe it’s because
those I needed to interrogate are gone.
I know a woman who, after the war, 

walked through villages in Lithuania,
searching for her disappeared.
She called it the archives of the feet. 

This year, I found my tías abuelas,
two old ladies, Mexican half-sisters
of my grandmother from a marriage 

that my gringo family tried to erase.
Their house in Cuernavaca is filled
with sunlight, saints, dark paintings, 

the aroma of simmering black beans,
and a portrait of their father—
my great-grandfather. As little girls,
they used to try to bite his bald head. 

⧫

Susan Okie is a doctor, a poet, and a former Washington Post medical reporter. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in various poetry journals. Her full-length collection, Women at the Crossing, won the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Delmarva Review is a literary journal with strong local roots. With a national and local presence, it gives writers a good home in print and digital editions for the most compelling new prose and poetry at a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. Editors cull through thousands of submissions annually to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee. The review is available from major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

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Author’s Note: “Gold Digger” explores how two characters met and ended up together, with the twist that each is a “type” we think we understand: the beautiful woman and the elite athlete. Reader sympathy often doesn’t extend to wealthy, accomplished people who seem to skate through life problem-free, so that’s the challenge: how to find the way into a core vulnerability that’s present—if hidden—that makes us all human?

Gold Digger

IT’S FOUR A.M., which someone told you is the loneliest hour, when people are most honest. His footsteps stalk the hallway, heading from his recliner in the den to the kitchen for more chips to another day. Heading from pills to booze, booze to pills. Heading into the end or the beginning of the end or maybe only the middle of whatever this love is. 

Once upon a time… 

“I LIKE YOUR SENSE OF DISCOVERY,” is the first meaningful compliment he gave, or maybe the first you remembered. The words flushed and warmed martini-tipsy you. 

“Sense of discovery,” you said, leaning forward, letting him discover cleavage in the dress you’d bought that afternoon, exactly for this moment tonight. 

“Really,” he said. 

This was your second time out, and the first was only a fix- up by one of his old girlfriends, your yoga instructor. “I have a feeling,” she’d said. “You two need each other.” 

“Not much of a basis for a relationship,” you joked, but she raised one hand: 

“Au contraire.” She’d lived eight years in Cannes—she place-dropped constantly. So pompous, which made you trust her. She said, “Need is the basis of everything.” 

You agreed: give him your number. A month later, a text asking to meet for a drink that night at a hotel bar you knew. Fascinating. Who’d be so rude? On purpose? Or unintentional? You immediately typed back one letter—a lowercase k—an obnoxious response, chosen purposefully. 

You were fourteen minutes late, prepared to enjoy a martini on your own, but there he was, beside the maître d’ stand: “I was ready to wait all night,” he said, “but thanks for not making me.” 

Everyone in the place recognized him. People interrupted continuously for pictures and stories, so real conversation never got going—surely intentional, how to hide in plain view. His way to not-fail, same as the ridiculous last-minute invitation, setting up things that by design shouldn’t succeed. It was a juicy thought, that you both valued the sensation of feeling successful—yet went about achieving success in entirely different ways. You remember staring in the bathroom mirror in the ladies’ room that night, thinking, I’m not bored yet. When you returned to the bar, he looked straight at you and said, “I’m not bored yet.” 

This second venture was more complicated: dinner for two in a private wine cellar room in a buzzy steakhouse. He was there when you walked in, exactly nine minutes late, though he hadn’t passed through the front door because you arrived twenty minutes early, paying the Uber driver to sit and wait while you watched from the backseat, feeling stood up. Startling to see him when you walked in, though you arranged your Mona Lisa smile as you murmured, “So sorry I’m late. I’m terrible.” 

He stood, seeming to fill the room. “Are you?” he said, and you wondered, was the question are you late or are you terrible? 

You said, “I’m both.” 

On the table: a martini shaker nestled in a bowl of crushed ice, decanted wine, a cold seafood tray. No waiter would appear for a while. You couldn’t have planned it better yourself, and you had the sensation of being here for a job interview, not a date. 

He gestured you into the seat opposite where he sat, the two of you directly across from each other, centered at a long, narrow table that could have been set for twelve. Candles flickered. Your heart thumped. You wanted this job, you suddenly thought, no, needed this job, whatever it would turn out to be. 

Not that it would do to say so.

You said, “Looks like you’re trying to impress me.”

“Are you?” he said. “Impressed?”

Your almost-imperceptible shrug. “I’d be a fool not to be, right? Big-deal football star, candles.”

He frowned, and you narrowed your eyes. Where was the miscalculation?

“That’s who I am,” he asked, “a big-deal football star?” 

“Who am I? A pretty face?”

“You are pretty,” he said.

“You did play football.” You recited the outline of his career: Nebraska, Super Bowls, the long career that trailed off into irrelevancy on the sidelines, the fans begging him to quit, his defiant refusal to leave the game, the career numbers that only almost add up to Canton. 

“Most people only talk about the Super Bowls,” he said. “Or the scandals.” There was his famous smile. Heady. An invitation to peg him as the naughty boy. Of course you knew the scandals. Barely scandalous by today’s standards, you argued in your head. You liked his pride in the scandals, his steakhouse extravaganza. Both earnest and ironic, a nifty trick. 

“Why’d you keep playing?” you asked.

He sighed.

“How could you be happy as the backup after being the man for years?”

“Who says I was happy during any of it?” he asked.

The silence wasn’t uncomfortable.

“Are you bored yet?” he asked with a charming smirk. 

“You’ll know when I am.”

On like that as you both peeled shrimp and slurped oysters—“I bought the GQ with your fashion spread,” you confess, “and taped the cover in my locker”—this faux rom-com banter passing for conversation and wit. “I always win,” he said. And you said, “But I never lose.” You could do this in your sleep, and surely so could he. 

Finally, you said, “Tell me one thing I wouldn’t know unless you told me, one thing not found off a Google search.” 

“Did you do a Google search?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Nah,” he said. “Sometimes I like to let what’s going to happen, happen.”

“Even if I’m an axe murderer?” you say.

“That doesn’t scare me,” he said.

“Then what does scare you?” you asked.

“Questions like that,” he said.

You shrugged. “I don’t have to ask them.”

“I didn’t say stop,” he said. “I said they scare me. What scares you?”

You paused. People rarely turn questions backward. People like talking about themselves; you rely on that.

Just as you were about to respond with “mice,” he said, “Go ahead, give some bullshit answer like most people.”

“I try not to be most people,” you said.

“Same,” he said.

You clinked his martini glass with yours. Proper gin martinis: clear, not cloudy, no tiny ice chips. That clarifying jolt. 

“Is this going well?” he asked.

You nodded, said lightly, “I see great things ahead.” 

“That’s what scares me,” he said. “When everything’s going too good.”

The waiter came. More martinis. Salads. Steaks ordered. And then:

“What scares me,” he said, the now empty martini glass couched between his two middle fingers, mesmerizingly so, “what scares me….” His pupils seemed to grow and grow in the middle of those ice-blue eyes; his eyes felt so large that you almost gasped. Yes, you were drunk. Yes, you were going to go somewhere and fuck, or maybe that was going to be right here, in a minute, soon—you breaking all your careful rules. Like grabbing a fish with bare hands instead of a hook, bait, a net; instead of carefully reeling in the line. Just diving right in. You weren’t someone who dove right in. You’re about to dive in. The feeling was intoxicatingly breathable: like cool air. 

“What scares you?” you whispered, afraid he’d break the spell by chirping that you scared him, hoping he would, so you could carefully slip back into banter and more banter. Really, weren’t you here to edge predictably and safely into his money and his life? Wasn’t that the task at hand? Stay until you got bored, then move yourself on to a better thing after getting a baby and a settlement. (No shame in taking care of yourself.) Your muscles turned as taut as a cat’s. Don’t screw this up, you thought, don’t talk, don’t talk.

“What scares me is that without football, I’m no one,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been afraid of my whole fucking life without the balls to admit.” He looked straight at you, into you, a dare. 

The right things to say were heat lightning, empty flash charging through you: sympathy, empathy, comfort, brisk words to fix-it-all-up-and-wrap-it-with-a-bow; me too! That’s what we’re all afraid of, even if we don’t admit it. 

There’s a job at hand, you think, do your damn job. 

You match the intensity of his pale eyes and say, “You can tell me anything. You can tell me who you really are. I’m not afraid of you.” 

And that’s when he gave the line about discovery. That’s when he admired your cleavage. That’s when you bent over that long table, hiking up your new dress, hoping he was worth smashing all your rules for, not his money and his life, but him. The man who dared admit such a fear, who needed someone to know who he really was. How did you, of all people, not know that what you needed was to care about someone? To say, for once, fuck the job. 

♦

Leslie Pietrzyk is the Featured Writer for Fiction for the 16th annual edition of the Delmarva Review. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020, and her flash story, “Gold Digger,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. A collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 (Unnamed Press). This Angel on My Chest, her first collection of stories, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, , Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, The Washington Post Magazine, and Delmarva Review, among others. Website: https://www.lesliepietrzyk.com/ 

Delmarva Review is a literary journal with strong local roots. With a national and local presence, it gives writers a home in print and digital editions for the most compelling new prose and poetry at a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. Editors cull through thousands of submissions annually to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

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Author’s Note: “Observe. Be curious. Ask. That is what writers do. The seed of the poem, ‘Ghost Blankets’ was planted as I walked through parts of DC on my early morning commute. What I observed were bodies—some still asleep under blankets, some waking—blankets still wrapped around them—beginning their days. It led me to ask who these people were, who gave them these many different kinds of blankets, why we pretend not to see them. And finally, for them to ask us to see them, to hear them, to understand they are not so different from us.” 

 

Ghost Blankets

Scattered
around the city—
in alleys, on street corners,
billowing over grates.
Blankets, miscellaneous
coverups
outlining bodies:
gray, bleak, ashy,
cotton, fleece, wool,
wet with dew or
overnight rain.
Thin throws,
ironic comforters.
Come morning,
a metamorphosis:
a body appears
a hunger arises
a ghost no longer.
Words
XXXXcascading
XXXXXXXXinto the frosty air. I’m here.
XXXXXXXXcascaSee me.
XXXXWhy is my language
XXXXso difficult to understand? 

⧫

Susan Bucci Mockler teaches writing at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her poetry has appeared in the Maryland Literary Review, peachvelvet, Maximum Tilt, Pilgrimage Press, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, The Northern Virginia Review, Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Cortland Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Voices in Italian Americana, and several anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, Covenant (With) was published by Kelsay books in 2022.

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal with strong local roots in the Delmarva. Editors have culled through thousands of submissions annually to select the most compelling new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction written today. Many writers are from the region. The review is available in paperback and digital editions from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

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