ISSUE 12

Eloise Schultz​

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Old Country

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Rousseau paints it as a walled city, patrolled by lions,

where the time is always dusk. Talmudic scholars

tell of constellations shining through its minarets,

 

streets paved in amber where music plays all night.

Residents, it is rumored, still practice Bogomilism.

It’s hidden below the sewers of Paris, if only you

 

open the right manhole. A map to its door

was once traced on the fogged-up window

of the ferry from Farewell to Fogo Island.

 

Its name has been used as a term of endearment,

though nobody alive remembers what it means.

My grandmother recalled it being somewhere

 

near the Czech border, where she returned

only once after the war and the Iron Curtain,

when nobody she knew lived there anymore.

 

It’s been spelled one thousand different ways,

blotted out on an Ellis Island ledger and

whispered at a Border Patrol checkpoint.

 

An ordinary place, forgotten in the most

ordinary ways. (Efficiently, with paperwork:

the cruelty that empties a village.) Locked

 

in a filing cabinet, it’s a cancelled visa.

Everywhere it was, there’s wistfulness,

the silence after a bell is struck.

 

Each time the air seems milder

like wind ruffling a field of lavender,

the first star to appear in a fading sky.

 

Staravicnija, Stariviqnia, Starovicnea.

You can hear it now, in a small town

grange hall, where a roomful of dancers

 

are linking arms for the last time, tracing

a circle on the floor while the music floats

around them, reversing gravity, sweetening

 

the air with a melody new and familiar,

as distant as memory, as close as a footstep.

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Copy Edit

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Remove italics, add quotation marks around The Rich Man. Change “everything” to “the colony.” After “contractors,” add “of summer homes.” Can a band really be said to specialize in the Star Spangled Banner? Political Corruption needs a complete source. Who are “average Americans” in this context? Remove capitals from “Territory,” “Founding Fathers,” “State,” “Imperial,” “Colonial,” and “Patriot.” Titles not given as part of a name, such as “President,” should remain lowercased unless the ego rule is in effect. Perhaps you could choose a more precise phrase than “the past”?

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