Author: Michelle Mitchell-Foust
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Anselm Kiefer’s “Oh Stalks, Your Stalks, Oh Stalks of the Night”
From the editors at The Showbear Family Circus: Since submitting this essay, writer Michelle Mitchell-Foust has passed away. We extend our deepest condolences to Michelle’s loved ones and dedicate our current issue to her memory. A brief excerpt from her obituary appears below. “Michelle was a life-long learner.” Musgrove Mortuaries & Cemeteries Philosopher Hélène Cixous…
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Vineland Drive-In
This is the sun for some of us, a still photograph of a whole movie, with the shutter all the way open at first, and closed again at the end, so the brightness of absolute presence confines itself to a host of parallelograms. Several screens tessellate along the horizon in the dark. White on white,…
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Chilean Mines
The corps of engineers can only dig between sixty-five and ninety-eight feet a day of the twenty-three hundred feet. All day we make blueprints for an optical illusion. We find the surface area and volume of miniature Ames rooms,and Daniel hands me a cube he made of playing cards, a labyrinth whose floor is the…
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Transformation
I hide the Shaker postcard in the textbook, its speaker with her back to us. Imagine. Every color in the roomthe various colors of hosiery. You have found, grey, the woman, her cloak covering her hair, a photograph in your book,sand, the basket on the bureau. You tell the storywhere her hands are, chiral, reaching,…
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Roald Dahl’s Tree
It would have taken, you said, at least ten people holding hands to encircle the tree. For each meter or so of circumference, a baobob is supposed to have lived one hundred years, so this tree in Tanzania, with a view of the Indian Ocean, is more than a thousand years old, several feet of…
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Ames Room
I believe in Trapezoidal Magic. The ophthalmologist Ames must have had a showman’s heart to construct a room whose walls are not perpendicular but slanted, and the ceiling and the floor incline so the world we see through the peephole makes a dwarf and a giant of the same man, and a ball rolls seemingly…