By Jen Cheng

She thought I was a “poor, raised by a single mother, low–class,
immigrant nobody” and
even if I was losing Nick
I was out to show her I am a strong, intelligent somebody.
Not only am I a professor who could command my NYU
classroom but I am also a cultured Chinese American
woman in her power smooth as James Bond, staging
a showdown with Mah Jong, and I proved to
Mrs. Crazy Rich, that she was so wrong.
Just because they are the super
wealthy did not mean that I was
going to submit to her
especially since
I am the domme of game theory.

*my imagined inner landscape of Rachel Chu
from the film, “Crazy Rich Asians” from my
chapbook, Braided Spaces (2023)

By George Szirtes

What terrible films we used to watch, films with their trousers
hanging round their ankles. Morecambe and Wise, do you
remember,
in Italy, in That Riviera Touch, on wooden benches, and the
laughter
breaking against something so soft and tender it was almost true;
films at the matinee with cowboys, cliff–hangers and ice cream
brought by an usherette, before we grew nostalgic about such
things.
There was no art then, none that we knew, since
it was not the film
but the entrance to the auditorium with its plush and scarlet
that drew us to the desired place where everything lived
on borrowed time, including us. They were truly terrible films,
shudders of embarrassment, reels growing a green stagy mould
that looked enticing, so we kept going to see more terrible films,
because times were almost terrible then but fell short of pain
that might be transformed into deathless dialogue, with death
like a vanishing into the ether of our terrible desires, now lost
and
laughable, turning into laughter somewhere on the riviera

By George Szirtes

No, not that Paris. The left bank of loneliness
has neither river nor tower and the solitary walker
has neither destination nor address.

And where are we? In one hell of a mess
in the middle of a desert, another forlorn figure
seeking what has brought him to distress,

and love is in its peepshow room where you confess
your guilt, and she weeps, and somewhere else it’s summer
in Paris where traffic moves past, silent, echoless.

By Gretchen Berg

At first, in my neighborhood, it was Disney.
Swiss Family Robinson made us build
sprawling tree forts and rip red caps apart
to stuff into dirt clod grenades.
We thought The Parent Trap twins
looked fake, but it was still cool
when they poured honey on the bad
girlfriend’s feet during the camping trip.
We discovered The Absent–Minded Professor
recipe for flubber but my dad saw us
carrying a tire, matches and a gas can
into the woods and stopped us.

Pretty soon the movies weren’t just kid movies.
The dad in To Kill a Mockingbird looked like
my dad, there were a lot of bad white grown–ups
except not the crazy guy next door, and Scout
wore a ham costume. Girls screamed all through
A Hard Day s Night, Joan Crawford and her ax
scared me forever, and I sat in the second row
all the way to the right for a James Bond
triple feature. Some kids didn’t get to see Tom Jones
because eating chicken and oysters was so sexy.
A Man and a Woman was cool and confusing.
We listened to the record and pretended to smoke.

Lulu sang To Sir with Love on a 45,
my brother pounded out Exodus on the piano,
and we knew the words to The Sound of Silence
before Dustin Hoffman did. I saw Dr. Zhivago
three times. He was completely cute
and completely good, but his wife
was rich and pathetic so once Lara shot
Rod Steiger we all knew what would happen.

Lara’s Theme was the most beautiful music
in the world. I’d listen and picture snow,
and revolution and Omar Sharif.
But mostly I pictured Julie Christie.