Places with Terrible Wi-Fi
The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas where my father once slept. Miles of rivers. The waiting room of a hospital in which a doctor, thin-looking in his coat, shared mixed results. A den of worms beneath the frozen grass. Jesus’s tomb. The stretches of highway on the long drive home after burial. The figurative abyss. The literal heavens. The cheap motel room in which I thought about praying despite my disbelief. What I thought was a voice was simply a recording playing from another room. The cluttered attic. Most of the past. The very distant future, where man is just another stratum in the ground. The tell of Megiddo. The flooded house and the scorched one. My favorite cemetery, where I can touch the white noise distorting memory. What is static if not the sound of the universe’s grief? Anywhere static reigns.
Feature Date
- February 24, 2022
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English copyright © 2021 by J. Estanislao Lopez.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
J. Estanislao Lopez’s poetry has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Waxwing Magazine and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. His debut collection, We Borrowed Gentleness, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in October 2022. He lives and teaches in Houston.
Issue 9
Bennington, Vermont
Bennington College
Editor
Michael Dumanis
Managing Editor
Katrina Turner
Bennington Review is a national biannual print journal of innovative, intelligent, and moving poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and film writing, housed at Bennington College.
Fifty years after its original founding and thirty years after its last issue, in 1985, Bennington Review has resumed publication, with poet Michael Dumanis as Editor.
We intend to reinforce the value of the bound print journal as an intimate, curated cultural space in which a reader can encounter and experience new work with a degree of immersion not wholly possible through other media. We hope to bring together writing that is as playful as it is probing, that simultaneously makes lasting intellectual and emotional connections with a reader. Bennington Review aims to contribute distinctive style and substance to the national literary conversation through publishing sharp, unexpected, original poetry and prose from a geographically broad and culturally rich spectrum of prominent, up-and-coming, and new voices.
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