A Few Diamonds, Mostly Rough

New Millennium Writings is edited by Don Williams, who has also handled the typesetting and layout and written a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut.  It includes a whopping 63 poems, 13 stories, and five pieces of nonfiction.  This is the first literary magazine I've come across that has photos of the writers beside their works, along with a short intro by each.  I don't know that these are necessary, but they're certainly distinctive.

I wish I could say the same for the bulk of the writing found here.  It's a mixed bag.  Here's the first sentence of a story that tied for first place in NMW's short-short fiction awards:  "The road to lure is the road of song as he submarined his way through the penumbras of quarter moon nights, dripping heated pitch down his sung-out throat."  The author, who shall remain nameless, says in her blurb, "[Her favorite writers'] words keep us from fleeing when all a morning may offer is cold stale fear of what next could crush the only edge left on a last dream." 

As for poetry, here is a poem in its entirety:  "It's February, sir, / that's the cruelest month, / once your days / are numbered."

Happily, we can move on to a few pieces that would be a welcome addition in any anthology.

Eve Brown's short-short story "Losing Africa" didn't take any prizes, but it's a winner nonetheless.  A white woman who spent enough time in an African village to be given the name Bwahinmaa (meaning one who has left her community) and bury a daughter there is initially rejected by a Women of Color group because of the color of her skin.  "You're just another white woman looking for culture!" one of the women tells her. Asked to wait outside the room while the women decide whether to admit her, Bwahinmaa recalls the women of her village and her life there.  "I was the one whokeened and wailed when they banged the funeral drums," she thinks.  "How dare you judge me!"  It's a fascinating quandary, a meeting of African-American women and a white woman who has lived a significant part of her life in Africa. 

Cathy Kodra's short story "The Most Interesting Thing in the World" is listed as "First Fiction," yet it's as accomplished and compelling as anything in the magazine.  It's almost too good.  Part present and part flashback, either one standing alone would have made a fine piece of work.  But together, we get a well-rounded portrait of a life.

Seventy-seven-year-old Pearl likes to spend her Saturdays people-watching at Flynn Memorial Airport in Flynn, Tennessee.  "She loved the impersonal banality of watching people walk past."  Pearl grew up hungry in Chapman, New York, where her siblings and she ate according to the days of the week.  As a result, Pearl grew up avoiding hunger.  "The airport was safe.  No one there ever appeared to be starving." 

Pearl has a good heart. Just how good is illustrated in the flashbacks to a nursing home where she used to volunteer.  One of the residents, a concentration camp survivor named Eva, undergoes an eerie nightly ritual with the help of the evening nurse.  Eva's baby was taken from her in the camps.  The ritual was a way of exorcising the horror of that event.  The first time Pearl looked on and didn't know how to help, the nurse told her to "get a washcloth and towel to bathe the baby and a blanket to wrap it in.  Couldn't she see there was a baby being born here?"  The baby was a doll, drawn by the nurse from between Eva's legs. 

Pearl's relationship with Eva is the most powerful part of the story and could easily stand alone, but the story ends at the airport with a pair of incidents, "one minor, involving a rat, and one major, involving a man," that is a fitting conclusion.  We can expect great things from Kodra.