New in Air/Light: Catherine Texier, Robert Fitterman, and Sarah Maclay
Dear Readers,
The seasons are changing, and fall is in the air. Even here in Southern California, it was crisp for about 3 days—it’s now 90 degrees again, so we can stop pretending we have seasons other than “wear shorts” or “maybe don’t wear shorts.”
Change is a big theme in a brand new essay by Catherine Texier, “In Praise of White Hair,” and it’s brilliant. So, too, are the excerpts from Robert Fitterman’s epic book-length poem Creve Coeur and new poems by Sarah Maclay.
We know you’ll love all of this new writing, and we’re thrilled to share it with you.
✌️
The Editors
Catherine Texier: “In Praise of White Hair”
In one of the last scenes of Gustave Flaubert’s great coming of age novel Sentimental Education, the hero, Frédéric, is reunited after sixteen years with Madame Arnoux, the older, married woman he has loved since his twenties. She has come to visit him and they’ve gone for a walk, but “when they came in, Madame Arnoux removed her hat. The lamp, placed on a dresser, lit up her white hair. It felt like a blow to his chest… something inexpressible, a repulsion and like the dread of incest… and the fear, later, to be disgusted… to be embarrassed to have such a mistress.”
He steps away from her, rolls a cigarette. It’s over.
I had no recollection of that scene when I decided, in March 2020, to stop dyeing my hair. But the horror of that “white hair” must have still festered deep in my psyche when I stared at the white roots, glowing like larva in the light, just as repulsive to me as to Frédéric. I had covered these roots with henna every two and a half weeks for more than twenty years.
Robert Fitterman: Creve Coeur Parts 1 and 2
—"Say it. . .” nothing but
the friendly faces of employees.
Once upon a time, I worked at this Creve Coeur store
and once when I was out back for a cigarette break,
I set free a gold helium balloon trapped behind a dumpster.
In bubbly cursive it read: Best Day Ever.
Sarah Maclay: “Hunger,” “Red Bath,” “It is Not a Bridge,” “The Hart”
Hunger
The slip was not satin, but poppy.
A linen sky gone pale and the long
cascading drapes and walls that same cool white
but the cypress, its fallen needles, the rooftops
were umber, the fence, the beginning of night:
small, invisible cries, and like a wing, that wooden
fence grew large with shadow as its shape
entered the window, umber,
amber bulbs exposed below
the flaring black shade,
plump with filament, lit, pendulous
and, it seemed, beginning to rise
as the languor of too many months-without-end—
enforced, unnatural languor—
had gathered, like silk, into the crack of thigh
against bent knee, the seam of fleshy upper arm,
crease of elbow, the mystery
of triangle made by the shade of red cloth fallen high over leg,
the shape the covered nipples made as the breasts splayed
to balance a hand flung backward, out of sight and
into foreshadowing, into the scent of the ganja filling the hallway
—nearly strong as skunk—curving its way below the door and into the room
through the rough-hewn gap where light crept through at night
across the closed face, brow held tight as scar above the nose,
kohled eyes focused by a dust mote on the floor or the inner
lip of the terracotta urn.
Scent of sugar, sweat, tobacco seeping through the old pipes,
clinging to the pillows like a second skin.
Galangal nights. Arpeggiated dawn.
Empty Newport pack on the hellstrip.
Mind like ribbons. Leather bangs.
Time beyond girdle, the giving up,
the belly abundant, the giving in,
again, again, again, again, again.