Doing the Death We Call Pretty

Stevie Howell

I could look to the trees rusting in the rain,doing the death we call pretty. Instead, I lorda little over people parking, coming & going                            remark silenton their body language—what gait is revealing—while I wait by the printer for a reportI don’t even need. The chore, it let me rememberthe world, free & flowing. On the hospital elevatorthis morning, an ancient head-scarfed womanw/a beard, wheeled by four jockeying children.A young, halfway-pregnant couple. A woman                my mother’s shapein a bob wig, on her way to the breast clinic.A surgeon’s Crocs streaked w/purple-brown blood.Jackson Pollock. In the caf, a man tosses friesinto his mouth for breakfast, his entire head & eyesbandaged up, white & soft as a Q-tip. Visionis my drug. I can’t tell if it’s working, b/c howdid my life become a sequence of                                                         how do I killthe next ten minutes? & the next ten? & the next?When is someone going to finally turn to me & say,all this time, what have you been doing?It will be an accusation, & a mercy.

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Stevie Howell is a Muslim writer living in Victoria, BC.

Summer 2018

New York, New York

Editor
Paula Deitz

Founding Editor
Frederick Morgan (1922-2004)

Managing Editor
Ronald Koury

Associate Editor
Zachary Wood

Assistant Editor
Eileen Talone

Founded in 1948, The Hudson Review is a quarterly magazine of literature and the arts published in New York City. Frederick Morgan, one of its founding editors, edited the magazine for its first fifty years. Paula Deitz has been the editor since 1998.

Since its beginning, the magazine has dealt with the area where literature bears on the intellectual life of the time and on diverse aspects of American culture. It has no university affiliation and is not committed to any narrow academic aim or to any particular political perspective. The magazine serves as a major forum for the work of new writers and for the exploration of new developments in literature and the arts. It has a distinguished record of publishing little-known or undiscovered writers, many of whom have become major literary figures. Each issue contains a wide range of material including: poetry, fiction, essays on literary and cultural topics, book reviews, reports from abroad, and chronicles covering film, theatre, dance, music and art. The Hudson Review is distributed in twenty-five countries.

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