Issue 14 (2018): Age
Five Years Old
in Editorial
This autumn, Understorey Magazine turns five. As editor-in-chief for those five years, I have learned a thing or two about the creative process, about art and time. These ideas have inspired our issue on age.
Words Fail Me
in Poetry & Audio
Snow is falling in my brain, gentle, / relentless. It starts with a small silence, / a gap / in the easy rhythm of talk. A familiar word fails / to arrive. / Bewildered by the changing landscape, / beginning to be frightened, I push on . . .
Big Chop
in Fiction
“No regrets, right?” Patti questioned and ordered at once, as she continued to cut. “No regrets,” Grace echoed, while thinking of things she had in fact regretted---the too-corporate work, the years spent seeking approval from family and friends . . .
You Can Do Better Than That
in Creative Nonfiction
One woman walking toward us stopped and said to me, “Well, aren’t you the sandwich generation.” Yes, yes I was. My days were full of caregiving from the moment I woke up until I laid my head on the pillow at bedtime.
The Stations of Her Loss
in Poetry & Audio
It came with first breath, / with a baptism from holy waters, with a slap / that knocked you into the noise of time. / It came, as always, with numbered / fingers and toes, a severed cord, a split brain, / division and oblivion; / a gift and a loss . . .
Insurgency
in Fiction
If my mind could go back in time and inhabit the body of my seven-year-old self, I would get on my bike, get out of that circle and ride the wrong way down a six-lane highway or straight into a wall, jumping off at the last second.
The Reclamation
in Poetry
When young I ran / loose and barefoot / Over partially colonised fields / and tide-transmuted rock. / Not pausing to consider the life / crushed underfoot / Or the millennia sharply pressed / into my tender arches . . .
Animal Kingdom
in Fiction
Richie and I were almost finished our morning constitutional, once around the lake, when he sprang it: "Why don’t we have a baby?" The call of a passing loon muzzled my response as I stooped to pat a French bulldog, a veritable blob of lard on the trail.
Badass Orla
in Fiction
Even with her failing eyesight, Orla can conjure up shapes in the dark like a magic lantern show. Cormorants wheeling over the Irish Sea, a pooka in the guise of a white hare. By some miracle, she doesn’t have to pee all night.
Two Poems
in Poetry
You are so young. You are so ripe. / Cinema lights are bright and bold. / Dalit untouchable is she. / Unbutton more, the director nudges. / Hijra with henna hands is she. / You look so young . . .
Face
in Poetry & Audio
My figment, my flirt, my false friend, / who do you favour? What’s your fee? You can depend / on craters and valleys and friction / to warn — you will not be able to flaunt your fiction / forever. You are mine . . .
To Dye or Not to Dye
in Poetry
To dye or not to dye, that is the question: / Whether ‘tis nobler to let the grey hairs win / And reveal the age she truly is, / Or to take arms against the march of time / And hit the Clairol aisle at Shoppers . . .
Our Lady of Thermodynamics and
The Rapture of Crazy Jane
in Essay & Poetry
Ageing takes guts. . . . Parsing our way through some bodily change, my partner asked “Is this normal? Is this what is supposed to happen?” I answered, “I don’t know. I’ve never been this old before.”