📬 Send My Love to Anyone with Janis Bridger & Lara Jean Okihiro and Annick MacAskill
Send My Love to Anyone | Issue 42
Hello Friends,
For Issue 42 of Send My Love to Anyone, I share an excerpt from Obasssan’s Boots by Janis Bridger & Lara Jean Okihiro and two poems from Annick MacAskill’s new poetry book Votive.
Kirby answers the question How are you? and I launch my Onion Man 2.0 podcast.
For Where Do I Start? I share a Last Person on Earth prompt in an attempt to prove that you can take any concept and make it your own.
Thanks to Erica McKeen and Susan Sanford Blades for Including Anecdotes in their gift guides for All Lit Up.
Also Susan Sanford Blades is running a lecture/workshop course called How to Be a Writer, and I’m going to be doing a guest spot on literary newsletters.
Hope you enjoy Issue 42!
Kathryn
There’s nothing left to do but pack. I can’t put it off any longer.
Haunted by the image of the Ishii family’s things being carried out of their home while they were driven away, we stuff everything into a few rooms in the house and put locks on the doors. The kitchen table and chairs and all the furniture, the lamps, our pots and pans, our gramophone and records, all Koichiro’s books, and our bed. We cram things into attic spaces and under porches. We put our dishes and valuables in cabinets built into the walls and then plaster them over to camouflage them. We pack things in sturdy trunks and bring them to the Japanese Language School or the Buddhist Church. Surely the church is safe.
Read Excerpt from Obasssan’s Boots by Janis Bridger & Lara Jean Okihiro
The way a frenzied starling / builds her nest in May, / one clutch of twigs / at a time.
Bottled
Light slow as honey
in its antique shell, rubber stopper
lazy at the end, snarled curl
of the lip ring silver
round glass—yes, glass, but thick,
the kind that keeps you guessing,
stretching for the other side.
The way a frenzied starling
builds her nest in May,
one clutch of twigs
at a time. The light unclaimed
through my delay, seeping in
as if from nowhere, stilted,
clotted as in the water
in the white-shelled tank I saw
one inverted summer day
in Melbourne, where a squid lay
slumped in a corner
like a pile of unwashed laundry,
her eye a steady accusation
before the rounded window
that glimpsed our own grey-glimmer world.
Gatherings: Murray Sinclair, Francesca Albanese, Writers' Trust Speeches, Public Domain Movies, Farzana Doctor, Between the Covers, Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Onion Man 2.0., and more
Welcome New Subscribers!
Send My Love to Anyone got some new followers and subscribers from the above post.
Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. I’m also glad you have a sense of what this newsletter is all about!
How are you? I’ve never liked the question.
How are you?
I’ve never liked the question. Never trusted it. Associate it mostly with doctors, professionals who I rarely if ever go to. I mean anyone close to me (my chosen intimates) will already know because they’re close to me, but others, what exactly are they asking as if they really want to know, and if they’re just being sociable/courteous buy me a drink.
🧅 —It’s because you work in the warehouse, Clinton says. Bud’s old school; he thinks only men should work here.
Onion Man | Episode 2
I punch us in while Clinton puts our lunches in the cool room. The cool room is a big room beside the lunch area that’s as cold as a fridge and that stays empty during corn season. Bud, the foreman, lets us use it because in terms of a lunchroom the warehouse workers get the shaft. The rest of the factory has a kitchen, fridge, microwave, and four vending machines that we aren’t allowed to use because the management doesn’t want us walking through the factory. Bud made a makeshift lunch area consisting of two tables, two vending machines, and the cool room, which I’m convinced makes my sandwiches taste like rubber.
If you are feeling hopeless, then give up hope. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t tell you to put on a brave face or feel better about yourself.
Water
If you are feeling hopeless,
then give up hope. I won’t
tell anyone. I won’t tell you
to put on a brave face or feel
better about yourself.
A friend of mine is a dear friend to Yousef in Gaza, and she has been trying to help him come to Canada so he can study at the University of Ottawa. Please consider donating if you are able.
