Challenge 578

Trawling

1. In Jeremy Szal’s “The Rainmaker”:

   1. What does “bucketed” mean?
   2. Is “The Rainmaker” a story or an anecdote? What details or structural forms might give readers the impression that is actually a chapter excerpted from a larger work?

2. In O. D. Hegre’s “Immersion Art”:

   1. Social Darwinism was a popular notion at the beginning of the 20th century. In what circles has it remained fossilized today?
   2. Can even the guillotine — let alone art — change the belief that privilege is a right?

3. In Mike Florian’s “An Illicit Incident at the Imperial”:

   1. What is the “illicit incident”? What purpose does it accomplish?
   2. Is the story science fiction or contemporary realism? In what way might it be considered “current events”?

4. In Alyssa D. Ross’s “A Wife Named White”:

   1. What might “hubby horse-bit” mean?
   2. Why is the dessert “sweetly sinister” and “filled with sins”?
   3. As a botanical term, “rampion” is related to the German “Rapunzel.” Does the poem recount or reflect the story of Rapunzel or another fairy tale?

5. In Channie Greenberg’s “Unlike Her Children”:

   1. What is the function of the animal imagery? Consider it a cryptogram: what is the key to the code, and whom do the animals represent?
   2. In what way is the mother “unlike her children”? How does she feel about them? How do they seem to feel about her?

6. In Michael Amitin’s “Big Brown Chuckle Bites”:

   1. What are “chuckle bites”?
   2. What are “feckless control” and “a lake of no return”?
   3. What is the relationshp between father and son in the poem?

7. In Tantra Bensko’s “Equinox Mirror”:

   1. Why might two characters — one female, the other male — have the same name?

   2. Ever since she fell on her tailbone on secret concrete years before, and her Kundalini rose up the right side of her spine rather than sticking to the center, making everything cry brightness, she hasn’t been able to fully get off the continuum.

      What is “secret concrete”? What is “Kundalini”? What does it mean to “cry brightness”? What “continuum” has she not been able “to fully get off” of?

   
   

   Responses welcome!

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