Today marks 25 years since the devastating 9/11 attacks. Even after all these years, it still feels impossible to wrap one’s mind around the enormity and barbarity of that day, as well as the ocean of grief left in its wake. All year, we’ve been celebrating BLR’s 25th anniversary, but there’s always a catch in my throat when I say those words, because BLR’s birth is intimately tied to 9/11. Our very first issue was off to press when the attacks occurred. Bellevue Hospital had snapped into high gear and we were scrambling in anticipation of thousands of casualties. In the midst of all this, someone from the printer—having evidently made the connection between Bellevue Literary Review and Bellevue Hospital—called on the phone. They just wanted to see if we were all okay. It was such an unexpected gesture of humanity, though one of so many, as we’d come to experience over the course of that week. Is there anything we can do? they asked.

The journal was already in production, but they let me write a quick note, which they’d print—gratis—on the inside cover of what would become Volume 1, Issue 1 of BLR. I hadn’t reread that note until just this week, as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approached, and it brought back a flood of memories—the horrific plume of acrid smoke over Manhattan, the ER staffed six-doctors-deep with hardly a patient in sight, the piercing blue sky, and the ubiquitous fliers. Within hours, fliers blanketed the city, taped to bus stops, lamp posts, police barriers, mailboxes, news vans, tree trunks, traffic signs, and every last square inch of the 250-foot construction wall that fronted Bellevue at the time.

Photo courtesy of Troi Santos

It is this memory that lingers with me the most—the thousands of faces peering out at us, smiling from graduation pictures, wedding photos, fishing trips, vacations.  The sheer breadth of humanity that was lost is the most aching legacy of the day. On this day, I think about those people, knowing that each one carries its own web of grief that spreads through families, communities, and stories.

We share, below, some of the writings that BLR published the following year, at the one-year commemoration of 9/11, as well as the cover insert from September 17, 2001. Wishing you all peace and comfort.

Danielle Ofri
Editor-in-Chief

Cover Insert from Issue 1

To our Readers,

The recent attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has devastated us all. Here at Bellevue we are still attempting to come to grips with the enormity of the tragedy. As it has for the past 250 years, Bellevue Hospital has been a center for both medical treatment and emotional confluence. The pictures of the missing cover the walls of our hospital, with unsettlingly detailed descriptions of height, weight, clothing, jewelry, tattoos, and dental work. The faces stare at us with a disquieting poignance, reminding us that 5000 is not merely a number. In between the fliers have now appeared poems, ribbons, flowers, and handwritten comments from the onlookers. It is impossible to walk by and not have one’s eyes and heart commandeered by this display of humanity.

In the face of the events of last week, so many of our life activities feel trivial. We at the Belleview Literary Review, like so many others, have had trouble focusing on the continuation of our work. When the Twin Towers were attacked on September 11th, the BLR was already in press. We were unable to change any of the journal’s content to reflect how our world has changed. We were left with the decision about whether to go ahead with our planned reading on October 7th, which was to celebrate our debut issue.

After much discussion, we have decided to proceed with the reading.

Having billed ourselves as a ‘journal of humanity and human existence,’ we are almost obligated to go forth, despite how awful humanity can appear at times. Literature and the arts have traditionally served a special role in our society, responding to great tragedy and helping us to reflect upon overwhelming emotions. By no means can we expect the arts to provide the elusive ‘closure,’ but we can contribute to the continuing tradition of art in our culture. In this light, we will go forth with our reading. Although the content of our journal and the readings cannot specifically address this crisis due to timing, we envision this gathering—and the Bellevue Literary Review—as a testament to the continuing spirit of humanity, to Bellevue’s role in this crisis, and to all those who have been affected by this tragedy.

September 17, 2001
The Editors and Staff of the Bellevue Literary Review

~~

Postscript: The October 7th reading, referred to in the cover insert above, did go on as planned, even as the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan started that very morning. Given the mood, we did not expect anyone to come, but in the end more than 100 people showed up. All had to walk past the emotional gauntlet of those fliers, now called the Wall of Tears. The mood was somber but there was also a sense of relief at having a place to gather together, of being able to turn to literature and art when ordinary words fail.

After 9/11: A Special Section from BLR Issue 3

From editor-in-chief Danielle Ofri’s foreword to BLR Issue 3, published in Fall 2002:

…[O]ne year later, the effects of that day linger, but have been filtered through various idiosyncratic and personal experiences. At the Bellevue Literary Review, we debated how a literary magazine—one based in a hospital—should handle the anniversary of such an event. Rather than create an a priori structure, we decided to see what our writers would offer, and then allow the issue to take shape. A call for manuscripts related to September 11th yielded hundreds of replies, so many of them heartwrenching to read. They easily could have filled the entire issue, but it seemed—as in many other cases of literature—that less would be more, and we decided to make only one section of this issue devoted to September 11th.

“Visual Anguish and Looking at Art”

by Carol Zoref

Have you seen it?

‘It.’ The question comes easier this way, or perhaps with less difficulty than finding the words to name an absence instead of a presence. The question is tucked between the detailing of deadlines, news reports, and the practicalities of living in a city that has been bombed.  My verb of choice: bombed. Neither ‘event’ nor ‘tragedy’ sounds right, though nouns will come soon enough. For now, here at the beginning, only verbs will do.

I understand these were commercial jetliners, not ICBMs, that split the steel and glass of the World Trade Center. But these were missiles none-the-less, guided to their targets by hand, by eye. Someone, a person, had a long-standing vision, intentions, imagined the explosions and death that would follow. The relationship of this action to seeing, including my seeing, is one of the things I cannot get out of my mind.

Have you seen it?

The question is whispered because of the magnitude of pain surrounding the subject of the wondering. It is a wondering inhabited by solemnity, sorrow, and an inference, I think, of shame. To have seen suggests a desire to look, and desire itself, in these first few weeks, is a feeling regarded with misgiving.

I live in Manhattan but I work in a suburb. The colleagues who also make this short trip each day are the ones who ask the question in the early weeks of our grieving. The others, the non-city dwellers, offer a beautiful meal from autumn’s bounty; a bedroom quiet even with the windows wide open, a comforting press of a hand. They are kind and generous and, above all, sincere, wanting to know how we urbanites are holding up.

They are glad they are not us.

by Joanna Catherine Scott

Last night, after the towers fell, I lay down
on my bed and waited out the long dark
falling hours, the silent, falling shapes of death.

I slept, and in my dreams I heard a rattling cry
as if a horde of souls escaped an earthly hell,
clamored for re-entrance to the light.

And then I saw them, filling up the sky
horizon to horizon. Necks thrust out, voices
thrust before, they came and came from everywhere,

drawing my eye toward the far ends of the earth,
like a mind in search of full extension of a thought,
and climbing, swirled into a dark tumultuous

tunnel in the sky…

“il Faut”

by Stephanie Hammer

He has always liked a garden. He needs to plant the bulbs. They were sent to him from England, from a private botanical society that knew about how he’d transformed an old abandoned lot in Brooklyn into beautiful Schraff Park with the help of the local kids.

The gardener sighs, wipes his sunburned forehead with an old-fashioned cotton handkerchief. Squints up at the sky. A good day to plant.

The English people had also just heard about his son. They were, he supposed, trying to say something about renewal, about cultivating one’s garden (he had gone to college once and he remembers that line), about life in the very heart of obliteration. He remembers gathering leaves in the park with his son George, and comparing the colors, red brown, dark brown, black orange with the skins of the people in his family. Aunt Bess was a maple leaf—part Cherokee, part Irish, and Uncle Geoffrey an oaky dark frond—from the Caribbean. George married a woman part Scot, part Cuban—sharp and sweet as a tanned pine needle, and now the peach and dark rose-colored grandchildren were frolicking in the dry leaves in November. Without their father… 

“Printouts”

by Dylan Landis

Janet reported that gray taffeta
curtained her walls. It was delicate. When touched, the ashen silk dissolved
around her thumbprint.
A policeman escorted her home, gave her an hour. She spent it
lugging chrysanthemums up to her terrace, sunspots
for workers dismantling the darkness.
For herself, she filled a suitcase.
Sue took the subway to Chambers
because Canal was flooded, buckled, pierced.
In an e-mail to L.A., she wrote that a drapery of dark particulate matter
refused to part, that the air pierced by Trinity’s spire
smelled like burnt mattress.

“Little Allegory From Sunnyside Hospital”

by Tim Suermondt

“I was the first woman President.”
Every part of her 60 pound body
preens like a peacock.
She pecks at the green jello,
watches a flock of birds
disappear between skyscrapers.
“Sad about the Middle East,
but I did what I could.”
She places her hand light
as a feather on her heart.
“A President is only human too.”

“Rubies of Babylon”

by Tim Suermondt

I lie back a little dreamlike,
let Mary Immaculate take the blood she needs.
The sun has found its way inside,
enveloping all of us in its light—
I swear I see my mother putting my brothers to bed,
“There aren’t any monsters. Be brave like Hoppy.”
Before I can say a word to her, she’s gone.
“You’ve got good blood,” the nurse says.
I answer with an expression mother always used
whenever she encountered something exemplary:
“Beautiful as the Rubies of Babylon.”
“Yeah,” the nurse says, quickly pulling the needle
out of my arm, “sometimes beauty is enough to make
me cry, if I didn’t have to cry.”

“Tremors”

by Elizabeth Schultz

This morning, a quiver vibrates
Through the backyard: a breeze tingles
In the ash leaves, a dragonfly dimples
The bird bath; on the edge of a spider web
A beetle, garroted, sets up a trembling.
On the edge of the land, planes crash,
Buildings collapse, steel melts, dust falls.
My mother awakes, believing she’d heard
Carols tolling through the night.

Additional Reading: “White Space”

In 2009, we published the story “White Space” by Amanda McCormick, which recalls the chaos and confusion in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. BLR‘s former fiction editor, Suzanne McConnell, wrote of this piece:

“It’s a truism that if you write well and concretely of one person’s experience, that will speak for the universal. Written in first person, McCormick succeeds in relating her narrator’s particular loss, her own accidental escape, and her slow groping towards regaining life in the aftermath so movingly and accurately that when I first read it, it took my breath away. Even now, re-reading it, it plunges me back to the collective shock of that day and so many days afterward, months. Even the title, ‘White Space,’ connotes the heart’s core of that time. Empty. Blown away. A survivor’s emptiness, stunned lack. It’s interesting that the BLR has received few submissions touching on this trauma. But this one is sufficient: it is a masterpiece.”

“White Space”

by Amanda McCormick

1.

She had to get to work. It was that thought that kept her moving against the tide of people pushing past her on Sixth Avenue. She had overslept and now she had to get to work. Her cell phone rang and she ducked back away from the crowds pushing against her path. Knowing who it was, she just pressed the phone to her ear, listening to him breathing. She tried to block out the shouting, the hundreds of feet on the pavement, running.

2.

Though she had always told herself it was only temporary, though she hadn’t made any real friends there, she had liked her job all right, the analysis of start-ups, the living hum of money and promise. She had a place in a cool white-walled room and took advantage of the calm it brought her. Starting out with data entry, the tasks they gave her were easy and diverting, lulling her into a state of suspension where random snapshots from her past would bubble to the surface of her consciousness, like the disjointed portents in a Magic 8 ball. Patent leather shoes on a carpeted expanse of Marshall Fields when she was ten. Friends of hers in the arts—directors of photography, traditional music enthusiasts—were being lured away and fattened with cash by dot-coms, start-ups of the type her firm analyzed. The symbiosis of patron and patronized was growing ever more confused, at least when she joined her artist friends for drinks. So you work downtown with all the suits now? What’s that like?