August 2019 – Michigan Quarterly Review

August 2019

close up of clenched teeth

Makeover

Laura Cesarco Eglin’s poem, “Makeover,” appears in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Summer 2019 issue. Blue lipstick in remembrance of days of intense cold of nails turning blue and lips to match when she’s tired she applies eyeshadow where the bags under her eyes should be, she feels free to mark her spirits rising the red lipstick …

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Books on shelf Stock Image

Carrying Ourselves Across: The Art of Self-Translation, a Community Partnership between 826michigan and the Michigan Quarterly Review

The task was, on the surface, a straightforward one: the student authors and translators, all English-language learners, would chronicle their experiences in one language and transpose them into another. They would carry their stories, as they had done their own bodies, into a context legible to their newly imagined audiences.

Two dogs playing on top of brownish grass

The Lookout Tree

“Are they gone?” Danny gasps. He is still a heap on the platform, motionless except for the heaving of his chest.

“Nope,” I say. “We’re gonna have to wait.”

Airea D. Matthew headshot

Black Ecstatic Ode

Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd
Street trolley
To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet and sugarcane blood
To the shooting nerve through the left hip and lower spine
To those flying gods on their routes
Praise to the red-headed Rasta and his ganja-laced T-shirt
To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign
To the sign which reads: “I’m not homeless, I’m just Black”
Praise to the barbers trying to calm the fatherless boys in their chairs
To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing
To soothing

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