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Front Porch – 2008

Issue 8

2008

Quarterly Image

Micah Zevin

Front Porch is a online journal of informative and plentiful works of fiction, poetry, reviews, nonfiction, interviews, and audio visual that are gratifying and engaging to the intellect.

Front Porch is a online journal of informative and plentiful works of fiction, poetry, reviews, nonfiction, interviews, and audio visual that are gratifying and engaging to the intellect.

In the story “Mandible” by Donna D. Vitucci, two children must face a man named Mandible who is successfully vying for the mother’s attentions, taking the place of their real father and supplanting the male child in the role of protector:

In kinder, pre-Mandible times, Mama had called me her Guardian Angel. She would scratch my head while we watched TV on the couch together. We’d sit, me in Mama’s lap and leaning back into her soft breasts and gone-soft stomach, and Jennie leaning into me, her big brother, the three of us stacked like cups in a cabinet. Mama had done steady, ill-informed choosing since the day she was born. Her worst choice brought Mandible through our door.

In this narrative, the children often take on the narration or the voice of the narrator, bringing the adolescents’ feelings to the forefront of this story’s debate.

In the poem “Grief and Its Source” by Adam Clay, the issue of grief is stripped to its stark and bare essentials: “Do I think the well has gone dry, / the bucket to be bottomless, the well’s bottom rising up and up / with the clouds in the sky slowly filling with briny rain, / meant to poison the well?” The author further explores the origins of our melancholy and how it often reemerges no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from it or block it out. In the piece, “Solo for the Flute,” by Christina Cook, it is as if you can hear the instrument’s vibrations careening in your ear:“I ask you and you say: / somewhere in a Fargo field / a rusted gate slams shut. In sepia // dusk you say: somewhere / sadness smokes a clove cigarette / and leaves a nickel for the waitress.” The disparate images melded together are written as if in a mini-symphony.

In the nonfiction work “Correspondences” by Valerie Nieman, we are admitted to a world where we describe the world, in this instance, the Parisian world, as if it is a landscape rich in metaphorical strokes on an infinite canvas:

The cars on a parallel highway are going very slowly – the Train à Grande Vitesse has hit its stride at 186 mph. The ride is smooth and quiet, impossible to tell how fast we move except by such referents as trees blurring close to the tracks or another TGV passing in a rocket whoosh.

Towers rise above towns and farther away, the folds of the land offer only towers. Silos? Grain elevators? Water towers? I draw them in my journal. One is a hatted round on stilts, like an old-fashioned wooden water tower. Others are truncated cones, wide ends up.

In this essay, we are transported to a universe where the background comes to the foreground and enriches our existences with its colors and shapes and objects that we encounter from day to day.

So enjoy a long nap, sit outside drinking your morning coffee or a glass of wine at night after a long shift and open up your laptop. There to greet you will be a journal so inviting in its sad and revelatory narratives that you will see the world, human emotions and the reality of their relationships at their darkest recesses and you will be comforted at the creaks and squeaks that it makes each time you peruse its electronic pages and sigh at the immensity of it all.
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