July 31, 2013 – Michigan Quarterly Review

July 31, 2013

Tracking Pants and Soul

* Kristie Kachler * I say I’ve lost so much and you imagine something awful, but I just mean the boring things, the standard things. The first that comes to mind: shortly after we moved to Berlin my love bought me a pair of hand-knit gloves at a market. On the ride home I fell off my bike and wore a hole straight through the gray and purple-striped palm; I mended them, but they soon fell out of my pocket. A friend in the know mailed a replacement pair, but these I left in the U-Bahn. I didn’t lose the precious incense holder, almost paper thin and perfectly celadon, that I had bought as a student in Strasbourg, but my cat broke it. When I moved abroad the cat moved in with a friend who fell out of touch.

Tableau Vivant, Part III: Dear Old Bookcase

* Gina Balibrera *

GAYEV: “‘Dear old bookcase! Wonderful old bookcase! I rejoice in your existence. For a hundred years now you have borne the shining ideals of goodness and justice, a hundred years have not dimmed your silent summons to useful labor. To generations of our family (almost in tears) you have offered courage, a belief in a better future, you have instructed us in ideals of goodness and social awareness….’

(Pause.)”

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