By Vince Corvaia

 

Prism Review is a quirky little periodical filled with middling talent and a cover photograph featuring shelves of bananas. It contains two interviews, the second one with Jane Austen, a clever conceit that unfortunately goes on too long for a conceit. At the back are brief book reviews, at least several of which are for books that are no longer new. Nothing in the contents struck me as excellent, but I managed to find, out of 31 poems and eight stories, three poems and two stories worth getting excited about.

 

“The Kiss,” by Peter Schwartz, is a short story that has brevity on its side. Merely half a page long, consisting of five paragraphs, it manages to convey the lengths to which lonely adolescents will go to make a human connection. “Loneliness” appears at the beginning and the end and might have sunk the little story under the weight of its heavy abstraction, but Schwartz has a delicate touch and, even with the theme spelled out like this, manages to make it work.

 

The plot is barely an anecdote. A beautiful fourteen-year-old girl named Gabriela tells thirteen-year-old Miguel that if he climbs the playground tree, she will give him a kiss upon his descent. He takes off his shirt and climbs to the very top, in time to see Gabriela mock him for his gullibility and throw his shirt in some bushes. Schwartz cleverly ends the story with Miguel still at the top of the tree, wondering how to get back down and realizing that he would have to become a real man “without loneliness” in order to make it in life.

 

Schwartz could have named his story “The Tree” or “The Dare” or (thank goodness) “Loneliness,” but “The Kiss” is the perfect title, representing the unattainable goal of the protagonist and the catalyst for his life-changing epiphany. As I continued reading Prism Review, I kept thinking back to Miguel stuck in his tree and wondering what would happen next.

 

Rita Rubin’s story “HoJo’s” in told the second person singular, a gutsy feat that Rubin sustains for nine pages. It takes place in 1977, when “the HoJo’s restaurant chain has passed its peak and begun sliding toward extinction.” The “you” of the story is a 48-year-old waitress who lives alone and has no children. She lives in an apartment with thin walls in a fading Victorian mansion on an island that, we’re informed, “isn’t as exotic as it sounds.” She sits in her kitchen with its hot plate and half-refrigerator and soaks her feet in Epsom salts after work. She thinks about the word “Epsom,” how it’s named after a town in England (“you dream of going there someday”), and she remembers childhood with her mother. This is her life. “HoJo’s” skirts sentimentality at every turn, but Rubin, in large part because of the story’s voice, just manages to avoid wallowing in bathos.

 

The plot is thinner than that of “The Kiss.” The waitress buys some crayons and takes them to work for children to use while they wait with their parents for their meals. This gives her the courage she needs to look for a new and better job (“The Big Boy restaurant is looking for a hostess”).

 

“HoJo’s” almost reads like a polished if not final draft in spots, and its language has some clichés (“You wake with a start, peel off your uniform”). But it works because of the speaker’s empathy and the protagonist’s resilient spirit.

 

Prism Review awards a poetry prize, and the winner in this issue is Kerry Ruef for “”What is Possible, Traveling by Car.” The characters are a man (the driver), a woman (passenger seat), a boy (asleep in the back seat), and a dog (whereabouts not specified). It is a love poem about the man and the woman, and it succeeds as much by what it doesn’t say as by what it does.

 

As the car moves west, facing first a setting sun and then the glare of oncoming headlights,

 

the man’s palm moves

from the steering wheel

to the woman’s breast.

“I love you,” he whispers.

His hand lingers

like the sun.

 

Not “the man moves his palm,” but “the man’s palm moves,” as if possessed of a life all its own, seeking what it loves.

 

The woman smiles at the weight of

the hand, moves it back to the wheel.

 

The woman, the more rational one, moves the hand back to the wheel, even as she smiles. Not “his hand,” but “the hand,” still an independent life force.

 

But the man’s hand is restless:

he rubs the back of her neck,

runs his fingers through her hair.

 

This is Ruef’s only mistake. It should have been “it rubs the back of her neck / runs its fingers through her hair”—the hand loses the power it previously had by becoming a part of him now. But it’s the only misstep out of 39 finely crafted lines.

 

And it is possible they each think –

or, in the case of the boy, dream –

things will always be this simple[.]

 

We don’t know where this family is coming from or where it is going, why it is traveling. We only know that the man and the woman are in love, that the man has to touch the woman he loves even from behind the wheel, and “that they have gotten through / the hardest part,” whatever that is.

 

I like Sherman Pearl’s “To the Guy Who Painted Graffiti on the Freeway Overpass” the least of the three I’ve chosen, but I admire its originality more than the others’. Who hasn’t seen graffiti spray-painted on some seemingly impossible canvas and wondered just how it got there? The driver in the poem contemplates the risk the artist has taken and pictures himself

 

next to you risking all for art,

tied to the girder with strings of nerves—creating

something larger than art.

 

Is graffiti art? Is it vandalism? Does it take more guts to spray-paint an overpass than to drive under it? Pearl’s poem prompts these contemplations. The driver can’t help but admire what he sees:

 

No space is safe; you’ve tagged

all the walls we’ve erected against you; now it’s

the clouds you’re coloring.

 

I like the way Pearl even has the lingo down (“tagged”), even while I’m not sure the average driver would know it. Instead of driving past overpass graffiti and either not seeing it or complaining about it, this persona has declared it art and, in so doing, become part of a poem that itself approaches art.

 

I’ve never been that high, kid,

but I think I’m beginning to see what you mean.

 

My favorite single entry of this issue of Prism Review is Lydia Suarez’s poem, “Pancake Kisses.” It’s really a novella in handy poetic form. Suarez traces the ebb and flow of a straight romantic relationship through years, as seen from the woman’s first-person perspective, the man the second-person “you.”

 

After a touching litany of facts that establish she will never know anyone as well as she knows him (going back to their college days), she states with remarkable bluntness what became of them:

 

You were indecisive.

I married someone else.

 

But that is only the beginning:

 

I’ve known you when we were single, when I was a wife, when I was

divorced, when you were a husband, when you were separated.

We were like watches that kept perfect time but were never

synchronized.

 

Suarez documents their meetings, partings, their entanglements within and between their own new families, with a fiction writer’s eye but a poet’s specificity and sensibility. The bulk of the poem’s latter half depicts a restaurant scene in which the two “new” couples run into each other and negotiate the awkwardness, everyone knowing who everyone is.

 

“I’ll get the check,” my husband offered.

As he began to lift her from the booster seat,

your wife came down the aisle in front of you.

Our timing was still perfect.

Her belly swollen in a six-month curve.

My husband let you by with a sigh.

 

My one complaint has to do not with Suarez, but with editor Sean Bernard. In the line, “You never said bourgeois anymore and spoke of hedge funs with gravitas,” “funs” clearly should have been “funds.” A typographical error such as this is critical, as it temporarily trips the reader out of the poem while he or she determines whether it is an error. Suarez and her fine poem deserve better.