STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
LAURA SCHULKIND
Dear Gabriel,
The morning glories have coiled through the window hinge. I cut them back. They reappear.
The guava tree presses against the loosening panes, and scratches at the glass at night when the wind picks up.
I woke to a radiant filament stretched from sash lock to bed lamp. A plump brown spider making her way back to the windowsill stash of mummified houseflies.
I must write to you about this solitude.
A letter from this new Macondo, City of Mirrors, sent across the black river.
Would you say: It’s just been a few months—99 years and change to go?
I fear we are much further along than that. Oceans rising for almost a century.
And consider Melquíades, your gypsy Merlin, astounding the first Macondanos with the wondrous telescope from Amsterdam.
“In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.”
I read this now, and across the distance feel his gaze. He looked through the lens and saw us here in our growing isolation—peering into screens to see across the world, screens that have become mirrors, like windows after dark.
How did you know?
Laura Schulkind, an attorney by day, is entrusted with others’ stories. Through poetry she tells her own. She has published two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press, The Long Arc of Grief (2019) and Lost in Tall Grass (2014). Her work as also appeared, or is forthcoming, in Bluestem, Broad River Review, Caveat Lector, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The Dos Passos Review, Eclipse, Evening Street Press, Forge, Good Men Project, Legal Studies Forum, Light Journal, The MacGuffin, Mad River Review, Minetta Review, Mudlark, Origins Journal, OxMag, The Penmen Review, Pennsylvania English, Poetry Expressed, Reed Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Talking River, Third Wednesday, Tiger’s Eye, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Voices de la Luna, and Willow Springs. Her published work and musings on why lawyer/poet isn’t an oxymoron can be found on her website www.lauraschulkind.com
