For 25 years, Bellevue Literary Review has been publishing stories, essays, and poems that take readers into the shared space where art and medicine meet. Throughout our anniversary year, we’re marking this incredible milestone by inviting you on a journey through the BLR archive, from the beginning through the present.
Join us each week as we curate special highlights — stories, poems, photos, and more — from each of our issues.
About the Issue
Issue 25 — subtitled “A Mosaic of Voices” — is a theme issue on the rich perspective of literature rooted in multiculturalism. It also marked the farewell issue for BLR‘s founding publisher, Martin J. Blaser, who was part of the visionary team that conceived the journal.
From the Foreword
This issue of the Bellevue Literary Review focuses on how culture intersects with health, illness, and healing. The diversity of manuscript submissions we received was staggering and it was both a delight and a challenge to winnow the pile down to what could fit between these two covers.
One of the most intriguing, and often the most honest, perspectives on culture is the child’s point of view. The seven-year-old narrator of Pria Anand’s story “Commotio Cordis” navigates Carnivale, her first bicycle, monsoon season, and her mother’s deafness with both innocence and incisiveness. Sonia Sarkar describes in her poem “The Rice-Eating Ceremony” how her chubby baby fingers were guided to choose her destiny. In the essay “Family Portrait, Guam, 1979,” Katherine Lien Chariott matches childhood to present. “You are not that man in those sunglasses…wearing those flared maroon slacks, “she says to her father in the photo. “Instead, you are…the smells, the colors, the emotions that overwhelm me from out of nowhere.”
We hope you enjoy the variety of settings and points-of-view in this special issue of the Bellevue Literary Review. We leave the last word on this topic to poet Hal Sirowitz—a veteran of many BLR readings. “I don’t know how you can sit there and accuse me with a straight face of not being multicultural, mother said. Haven’t I taken you to Chinese restaurants…?”
– Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief
Read Highlights from Issue 25
Each week, we’ll be highlighting one outstanding story, poem, and essay from the featured issue. We encourage you to explore more from the issue on our website or, better yet, to pick up a copy!
Commotio Cordis
by Pria Anand
In June, Lydia turned seven, and her father bought her a blue bicycle. He shipped it on the catamaran from the mainland, and she rode it up and down the shallow hill beside her house, past the cemetery and around the bend to his store, leaning forward on the handlebars and spinning the pedals faster than they could catch the wheels while her mother watched anxiously from the porch.
At seven, Lydia had wide eyes and a high forehead that curved like a sugar mango. The bigger children played marbles with a circle in the dust in front of the store, and when she passed on the bicycle, they yelled, “where’s the moon, Lyd?” and she covered her forehead with her short fingers splayed. They teased her because she showed off, biking in wobbly circles beside the road, leaning wider and wider until her training wheels scraped the ground.
Family Portrait, Guam, 1979
by Katherine Lien Chariott
Man (38 then, 61 forever)
You are not that man in those glasses, wearing those flared maroon slacks, brown hair styled in a
comb-over, flashing that fabulous smile. You could never be that man in that wide-collared shirt,
unbuttoned too far, with those heavy gold chains shiny against the chest. No, most definitely not
that man with the half-crazy look in his eyes, the one in that photograph, who pretends to be you.
Instead, you are the images in my head; the sounds that stay with me; the smells, the colors, the
emotions that overwhelm me from out of nowhere…
Woman (30 then, 63 now)
You never were her: that woman with one perfect hand up blocking the sun; the one standing so casually, wearing those bellbottom jeans and that striped button-down shirt, both fitted to show off her figure, God that figure you somehow managed to keep into your fifties, though it was not really yours, since it belonged to that smiling woman in this picture, the one who is not you. How could you be her, when you are those hands I know so well, with their crooked, arthritic fingers; when you are that dimple under your eye that shows when you are angry, the one I have only seen on other Asian faces, that dimple missing (significantly) from this photograph? No, that woman is not you…
The Rice-Eating Ceremony
by Sonia Sarkar
Nine months into my life, I am asked to eat on command
These tiny bursts of cylindrical snow that will reappear
Again and again: pelted dry at my head as I become another;
Turned impossibly orange at the taqueria on Newbury;
Set to the side as each year’s blood sugar tests inevitably rise.
In the now, a paper crown weighs heavy on my tiny head,
Accenting eyes that opened yellow upon greeting the world
I was a jaguar-baby, ravenous in my desire to gulp the air
Hair bristled and ready to poke out Ma’s russet iris
As she guides my chubby fingers to choose a destiny:
the pen, the spoon, the jewels, the clay, the book.
Issue 25: The Cover
Chest Clinic, circa 1915
This photo was taken in the Chest Clinic—identified by the inverted cross of Lorraine on the upper arm of the physician. This symbol was also used by the Tuberculosis Association.
By headgear, it is clear that the nurse (pictured on the back cover / left side) was not a graduate of the Bellevue School of Nursing. Bellevue founded the first American school of nursing in 1873, and established the tradition of nurses wearing caps from their graduating school (rather than from their place of work).
The Bellevue cap—designed by Euphemia Van Rensselaer—was an inverted-cupcake shape made of pleated organdy. Initially the cap covered the entire head, as it was “not to be worn for coquettish reasons,” but over the next half-century it streamlined and sat only on the crown. It was sometimes affectionately referred to as the “Bellevue fluff,” but its prestige was zealously guarded. Nurses were instructed to shred their soiled caps, lest a nefarious interloper fish one out of the garbage and impersonate a Bellevue nurse. Our sources could not identify the origin of the “flying nun” cap worn by this nurse. If you can solve the mystery, please contact us.