Cataract Surgery Blues

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By Raymond Barglow
Last week I handed myself over to a medical team at Kaiser-Oakland that did a cataract surgery on my eyes.  My symptom?  I couldn’t see clearly, and no eye-glass prescription was sufficient any longer to fix the problem.  Then a doctor at Kaiser told me: there’s clouding in the lenses of your eyes that’s been building up for many years; cataract surgery will replace those lenses with new artificial ones, thereby repairing your vision. Immediately following the operation, I discovered that I could now see blue as never before in all my years (within memory) of viewing the world around me!  Turns out that an eye cataract sometimes adds yellow to the visual field, and the surgery corrects that.  Before the surgery, with both eyes affected by cataracts, it had been as if I were unknowingly wearing a pair of sunglasses that painted everything with a veneer of yellow.  Now, when I view the world through born-again eyes, I see an astonishing gamut of shades and textures of blue.

Articles

Poetry: The Ten (or so) Plagues by Nicola Morris

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God is a visual and auditory learner
his angels say.  He doesn’t like to read
but show him a picture of twenty dead
children, tell him he’s the least popular god
in the history of gods and then he’ll drop
fifty nine Tomahawk missiles. Pictures of bear cubs or wolf pups don’t move
him though. He signs the paper allowing his
chosen people to murder them.  Sioux
or Lakota stories of river water diluted
with oil or blood excite him. Either no-one told him the story
of the earth heating up or
he wants the seas to rise. He sends all those dark people
who worship different gods
away.  Only his chosen people
can stay.

Articles

Poetry: Love Letter to Syria by Laura Lauth

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Love Letter to Syria  by Laura Lauth

The bats cross and recross the dusk. What they hear is theirs to eat. Wind chimes admit the many worlds

through. Our key lime comes to bloom. We’re living here in spring—a blaze

of early East Coast heat.

Christianity

Autumn in Jerusalem

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As I walked home I felt as if my feet weren’t touching the ground. The bright faces of the handicapped children were imprinted in my memory, and now I thought of each one of them, walking and singing, the nuns looking after them. I retained the light of the convent within me: its grace touched me, expanding an inner space, cheering unknown corners.

Christianity

The Incident at Our Lady

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I.

Phil had Sheila on the mind when he walked into one of the BOYS bathrooms at Our Lady of Peace Elementary in West Russelsburg. He’d started his shift as Second Security Officer at 6:00am, about an hour before most teachers get there, and about an hour and a half before the earliest kids get dropped off for the Before School Fitness Club, which was really just thirty minutes of kids running in circles on the field while one of the coaches watched, thirty minutes of free daycare and an earlier arrival at the office for the parents who didn’t care if they made their poor kids show up sweaty for the 8:00am Daily General Assembly. Phil had Sheila on the mind when, at about 9:00am, the school was quiet except in the classrooms and he’d walked down the quiet hallway in the main classroom building and walked into one of the BOYS bathrooms. He’d been thinking about her all morning, as usual, and he’d been thinking about their seventh date—set to happen that night—and the fact that he was now going by Phil instead of Phillip, all because on their first date, three weeks ago, she said in a nervous fast-talking first-date kind of jitters voice, Phillip? Phil? Is that you?

Articles

Waiting for Trump

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I sit in one of the greasy truck stops on Interstate 5, near Red Bluff, dizzy and scared.
Decades of hope seem suddenly to turn to bullshit.
Dread and rage swirl around the country, but the lunch counter is quiet with snoozing baseball caps tipping into coffee cups.

Culture

Monetizing the Chicago Cubs & Entertaining Angels

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by S.L. Wisenberg

 

 

My husband came in the front door and said I needed to go out and amuse our neighbor, Sharon. She was trying to sell her parking space to Cubs fans and was getting bored. Before she stood with her sign, her husband John had tried his luck for about 15 minutes.  

Sharon was leaning against a parked car with her sign for E-Z Out Parking, $40. In a couple of hours Game Four of the World Series!

Fiction & Poetry Articles

“Fighting in the Captain’s Tower”: In Defense of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

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Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature for songwriting. He is a poet, but his medium is not the page. So yes his lines read different when you take away the music. But by reintroducing poetry to an existing popular musical genre, Dylan opened up possibilities for all poets. What Dylan understood very early is that in an electric age, poetry cannot survive without song.

Fiction & Poetry Articles

Ever-Dying People: Review of Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Jacob Bloch, the grandson of Isaac, a survivor of the camps, and Julia, an architect who has never had her designs built, have three sons: Sam, Max, and Benjy, wise and lovely kids. Jacob’s father Irv is an outspoken enemy of Arab states and his opinions lean on the rest of the family: his blog manifestos are pretty much the opposite of what you would find in Tikkun. They all live in Washington, DC.  Sam, the eldest of the Bloch children, is studying for his bar mitzvah, but has been caught writing a list of vile racial epithets, quite out of his character, but perhaps under the influence of his grandfather. The rabbi brings Julia and Jacob in to discuss their son’s sin, and threatens to disallow Sam’s bar mitzvah, a much anticipated event that arguably keeps great-grandfather Isaac alive. Sam claims he did not do it, though the words are in his handwriting.

Fiction & Poetry Articles

30th Anniversary Special Essay: On Anne Winters’ “The Displaced of Capital”

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When I opened the mail back in 2000 and read the poem she had sent me, “The Displaced of Capital,” I knew I was holding in my hands a signature poem. But of course there was no way to know that, following publication in Tikkun, “The Displaced of Capital” would announce the title of her second book, one of the most important and impressive books of poetry in the last 12 years.

Culture

The Rural Route

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The gravestones rose at the top of the hill. They were black or gray, clumped together geometric and precise as if for protection from the outside world. He was mindful of how in the old country, people broke the things of the living and the dead when they vandalized cemeteries.

Fiction & Poetry Articles

New Poems from Ari Banias: “An Arrow” and “Bouquet”

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“An Arrow”

Too often I’d like some direction

but am ashamed of this fact, still I ask for it,

men are supposed be bad at admitting

they’re lost though why men agree

to fulfill this is lost on me. Who cares what men are. Can’t we

scrap this whole enterprise, seriously

top down management

small talk, normative dating. A little box

I fill in over and over, like feeding pennies into a slot

it leads somewhere I think

I’m saving them. For when?