New England Review

They Drove | By Sean Hill

londonbridge

It’s 1973 and they’re young and newly married. They grew up in the same small town in Georgia. He’s seen a little bit of the world—Tennessee, Alabama, and—framed by airplane windows—Alaska, Mt. Fuji, and the Philippines. He has Polaroids of these places that he mailed in letters to his momma, sisters, and wife while he was away—show them a very little of what he’d seen. There’s been a war going on, and he enlisted before they could draft him and tell him where to go.

When he comes back home to Georgia, on leave to visit family and pick up his wife for the long drive back to Fort Lewis in Washington state, they learn quickly to wake him slowly. Though he doesn’t much talk about it, he does say it wasn’t as bad for him as some of his buddies. He’d kept helicopters airworthy over there. He and his wife, they drive across the country in his ’65 Chevy Chevelle SS four-speed—American muscle. They take the southern route—through Texas out to California and up the coast to Washington—and they see more of America on this trip than most in their families have seen or will see in their lives.

This morning, as they check out of the motel in Flagstaff, a postcard catches his eye. He points it out to her. What looks to be an old English village with a towering bridge behind it and mountains in the distance behind that. They read the fancy script: London Bridge Lake Havasu City, Arizona. And she wants to see it; it’s only twenty miles out of the way. He wants to see it too. What’s the bridge doing here?

A rich businessman and land developer, looking to build an oasis in the desert, bought it from the City of London two years before—had it taken apart, the pieces carefully numbered and brought to Arizona to be put back together on a peninsula in a new manmade lake on the Colorado River. The land was dug from beneath the bridge to let water flow and create an island—a reason to cross the bridge—a destination in this landscape of sand and buttes. Take an old stone bridge and seed a new desert vision. A bit of out-of-place past to build the future in this country to prove anything’s possible.

They have dreams and will soon have a family of their own. It’s 1973 and it matters, but matters differently every day, that they’re Black and the rich businessman is white—things seem to be getting better.

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Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr – “London Bridge–brought from London to Lake Havasu City in 1971, May 1972,” photograph by Charles O’Rear. National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Sean Hill’s first book, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. His second collection of poetry, Dangerous Goods, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in early 2014. He’s currently a visiting assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. More information can be found at www.seanhillpoetry.com.

Japanese War Balloon | By Jill McDonough

war-balloon

During WWII, Japanese schoolgirls were called out of school because of their nimble fingers. They brushed root paste on washi paper and layered it, pasted pieces to pieces across sumo halls, courtyards, school auditoriums. They made paper balloons like this one.

The balloons carried bombs over the Pacific to here. They figured out what’s a jet stream, used to it send bombs up and off and aimed toward the Pacific Northwest.  They landed in Thermopolis, Wyoming, and Santa Monica. In Lame Deer, Montana and just outside Detroit. About 300 turned up.

But when the jet stream works, the Pacific Northwest is wet and cold. So hardly anybody died.  Except at one Oregon church picnic—a pastor’s wife, a group of children. The pastor dropped them off and went to park. The wife was pregnant, wasn’t feeling well. She found one of these in what was left of the snow, and walked toward it with the children, calling: Look what I found, dear.

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Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons – “Japanese War Ballooon, collapsed balloon on ground, close up of various parts of balloon & mechanism,” 1945, National Archives and Records Administration Central Plains Region.

Three-time Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough is the recipient of NEA, Cullman Center, and Stegner fellowships.  Her books include Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008), and Where You Live (Salt, 2012).  She directs the MFA program at UMass-Boston and 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center online.

Ume | By Kelly Luce

ume

It was her best, if a bit outdated: silk from Harada, the print and colors elegant, not too feminine. When meeting another woman’s husband, one ought not overstate things. She twisted her hair upwards and pinned the bundle with a black lacquered kanzashi, revealing a finger’s width of skin above her collar. The first time he’d kissed her there, he’d shuddered. He called her ume, after the mouth-puckering sweet and sour plum.

Afterward, she walked outside. Stooped figures tottered, flesh and clothing hanging from bones like rags. Only a few cried out. It was as if the world had gone mute, as if the air through which sound normally traveled had been vacuumed away. It burned, so they went to the water. After a couple of hours, the rivers filled with bodies. Maggots took up in the limbs of the dead and dying.

Every time she closed her eyes, a bulb flashed and a vision of umeboshi filled her mind. The pickled plum was a deep shade of pink and wrinkled like a grandmother. She couldn’t help but experience, over and over, the moment before the first bite, the way the mouth watered.

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Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – “The patient’s skin is burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the explosion,” c. 1945, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Kelly Luce’s debut story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, is forthcoming from A Strange Object in October 2013. She’s currently a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX. Find her online here.

Graffiti | By Joshua Rivkin


According to the Racine Country Military Record Archive, a John J. Kroes enlisted as a private in the Air Corps on October 30, 1942, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What stands out in his inscription are the commas. Between John Kroes’s first name and his father’s name, between his father’s name and his mother’s home are a series of half-moons, half-hearts, half-throated commas, like memos from the dead: delay just this. Read this slowly. Wait. As if an answer to the question of why—why write your name knowing it would be erased; or why write your name on something that was being sent to kill. As if there is an animal desire to see our names—the image of ourselves writ small, a tiny mirror, a father’s ghosted body, a history—carved on any blank surface. Our names, little lighthouses of graffiti, signal from their dark—cave wall, tree, gas station bathroom, school desk, church pew, bomb. There are no blank surfaces.

There are, by my count, nine names on the bomb. My grandfather’s name isn’t here. But might have been. Or so goes one version of American History told in my family: after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was one of the first soldiers on the ground and the radiation, invisible as gravity, killed him twenty-five years later. And so it’s not too big a stretch to imagine him alongside these other men signing his name on the aluminum sheet tail, then watching the B-52 disappear above the Pacific.

In another photo, not part of any national archive and displayed nowhere as far as I know, not in the house of my aunt or my mother—I’ve never seen it and take its existence only as hand-me-down gospel—my grandfather stands on a pile of rubble with a skull in his hand. Smile, frown, fear, some look of dulled awe or terror, I’m not sure. Quickly following the famous lines, Hamlet says, skull-handed, of poor Yorick, “…he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”   The it unnamed, unspoken—grave, death, afterlife where the body is just bone and the name of the man becomes the fact of his absence. Maybe the photo never existed. Maybe the cancer that killed him was just a coincidence.

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Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – “Different names which have placed on FM (Fat Man) unit,” National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Joshua Rivkin is currently a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry, his work has appeared in VQR, Slate, Southern Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.

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