The Shroud of Hubris
by Martin Vest
The Shroud of Hubris
for a fish
In those days I had panic attacks so severe
that I once shit myself to avoid the risk of passing
someone on my way to the community bathroom
of the sleazy hotel where I pretended to live,
where we all pretended to live —
the man in the next room with only one sock
but an arsenal of guns to polish like wingtips,
the alcoholic across from me
who recited the rosary night and day
and wouldn’t stop crying,
the vet who knew ten ways to kill a man
and practiced them all on himself.
A river ran just outside the building.
Not the splendid thing of cinema,
but a dirty canal banked by concrete,
condoms sloughed like the skins of lightbulbs,
old liquor bottles filled with Giardia and smut.
When you died I placed you into a white rag
and carried you there, your tiny purple image
pressed on the cloth when I unfolded it.
I thought of Turin, Veronica, but also of saviors pressed
like butterflies in a book, your majestic color washed away
in the brown water where other dead things go to die —
the rotting mattress on which lovers once loved,
the shopping cart, the stolen bicycle —
the guns and fists and weeping supplications
that waited upstairs in the river of crazies
where I myself was crazy.
I thought of you, but also of the species that walks on bombs,
the 40-watt lodestar that lights our dolorosa,
the bad decision of us,
the double sapien of us,
the gauntlet of spectators I’d pass on my way back
to the tenuous privacy of my room,
pupils opening and closing around me like salty mouths,
my agony an inky trifle floating in their eyes,
as close as I came to swimming.
Coca Milan
Coca Milan: was a member of the Chilean MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria — Movement of the Revolutionary Left) When Pinochet took over, she and her husband were exiled to Canada. She and Lumi Videla (a leader in the MIR who was captured and tortured to death in the days following the coup) had been childhood friends. She made the weaving, a reproduction of which appears in this issue of The Cafe Review, in tribute to her. This beautiful art piece was gifted to Margaret Randall when they met on a lecture tour in Canada in 1975.
Dora Lopez
Dora Lopez: graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in 1987 with the third prize in her class. She then won the first prize awarded by the Barranco gallery at the school’s annual exhibition. Her first solo exhibition was held at Gala Sala de Arte where her work was influenced by Orphism. Orphism was a denomination given by Guillaume Apollinaire, to artists who created a universe with elements not taken from visual reality, but created entirely by them, they supposed a rhythmic dynamics of color and consisted in transferring the cubist composition of the painting to the ground of expressionism.
Josefina Auslender
Josefina Auslender: (Argentina) was born in Buenos Aires. She was Educated at the Periugino School and the Escuela Nacional de Belles Artes Prilidiano Puryrredon, she earned the degree of Professor of Visual Arts. From the late sixties through the mid–eighties, she exhibited widely and received awards at the Salon Nacional de Ceramica, the Bienal Santa Maria del Buen Aire at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and Premio Bull V Bienal de Maldonado in Uruguay. She moved to Maine in 1988, and continues to work.
