Summer scrambled us, Slushies, from UAE to North Carolina, from D.C. to Scotland and back, from North Carolina to New York City, and to Philly, of course. Phew! Sam has just returned after a month-long residency through the Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland in an actual castle where she worked on her novel. The crew came together on Zoom to discuss two poems by Elvira Basevich, “Beautiful Girls” and “Pallas Athena”. The first poem transports Kathy and Marion to their teenage days on the Jersey shore. For Marion, the ending of the poem with its Beauty in the bathroom mirror, recalls the energy of Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph like a Girl”.
The discussion of “Pallas Athena” notes the poem’s foresight to mark a memory as it’s made, which sends Marion to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and has Lisa mis-marking that poem as the one with daffodils. Imagining the future while in the past also reminds Marion of André Aciman’s discussion of arbitrage and Tintern Abbey in the New Yorker. We talk about endings, Slushies, and how hard it is to nail the dismount. Last but not least, we celebrate the release of Marion’s new book of poems, Gladiola Girls, with a group photo. Be sure to check out the picture to peep how Kathy’s chrome manicure matches the book’s color scheme.
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Samantha Neugebauer, Lisa Zerkle, and Sebastian Rametta (sound engineer)
Elvira Basevich is assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Davis. Her first poetry collection, How to Love the World (Pank 2020), was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared in Pleiades, On the Seawall, Diode, & The Laurel Review. Lately, she’s been writing a lot about her father who returned to Russia years ago without saying goodbye.
Website: www.elvirabasevich.com
Instagram: @elvirabasevich
I used to line up with teenage girls on the boardwalk
like oysters on the half shell. We kissed each other
for practice. We guessed how much nakedness we
could fit inside our mouths, swallow whole or spit out.
These are some of my best memories. Sitting on
lifeguard chairs till dusk talking about life.
Dates, gulls, the milky surf came to us, but they
had to climb a ladder to our perch. Bring an offering
of beer and cigarettes. Even then, we admitted few.
Our bodies were a salvation then, a cause for celebration,
something new to smell and taste and touch every
morning, the threshold of a pagan’s afterlife:
an all-you-can-eat buffet of physical pleasures. All these
years later, even without the hours of applying makeup
in the bathroom mirror, matching mesh crop tops
to low risers, taking selfies, I feel so beautiful.
I don’t mean that metaphorically, as in Plato’s description
of a beautiful soul as a chariot pulled by two winged
horses, but the real, pulsating thing: the Beauty
who looks back from the bathroom mirror and smiles.
We tracked deer in the snow, studied philosophy
and mathematics. Like you, I inherited
my father’s passions: the love of war, physical beauty,
America’s Funniest Home Videos. I can still hear
his laughter in a hotel in upstate New York
on our only family trip. Soviet émigrés
with blue hair and adult grandchildren
preferred to speak in English and eat hot dogs
and hamburgers rather than piroshki
and cold cuts with slivers of wobbly jellied fat.
We ice skated among pine trees and rooks.
Napped in cots before waiting in a buffet line
in a wood-paneled cafeteria. Pallas, that weekend
you took care of me like a big sister.
You showed me a bloom of wildflowers by
the frozen river, a dusk replete with angels,
reminders that this too won’t last, but
it will become my favorite memory of my father.
That was your greatest strength: to have
the foresight to remember a moment as it faded.
You didn’t judge me when I left all my doors
and windows open and called out to my father,
Come in. That sometimes we don’t choose
the angels that we believe in, as a house
does not choose the ghosts who wander its halls.
