Victoria Redel, Paradise

Victoria Redel is the author of four books of poetry and five books of fiction, most recently Paradise 2022 and the novel, Before Everything. Victoria’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated into 14 languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, the Harvard Review, Salmagundi, O and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Victoria is Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Selections from Paradise, Honorable Mention, Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize

Garden

In the first weeks, we already knew
this was history,
that you’d speak of our nakedness,
the flat grasses we wove & slipped over
each other. First there were frills of green
leaf, stalks, tips too. Later came wild
onion, the sharp tang of shoot & bulb.
Then peaches. Standing together in sunlight,
of course, praise & song. We hardly cared
that you would get so much of it wrong,
that you would always speak of an apple or claim
that one of us was so persuaded by the snake.
Darlings, we imagined you. Over & over, how
you would break each other. Wound this garden.
Only then, still licking the dried peach juice
sticky down our fingers, did we know shame.

If You Knew

He wanted to take the muddy stream where he sang with frogs.
She wanted to take dawn in the linden tree.
They left a reed basket of wind.
He wanted the resin of August.
She left the feather grass of an evening walk.
They left all the tender minutes unbuttoning her blouse.
She wanted to pack the folded sun from the linen closet.
He wanted to take the shuffle of her slippers on the stairs.
She wanted her mother’s fingers rummaging through the button box.
He wanted the Steppe’s black soil.
They left moss between stones, the steel winter light in the room
where she sewed, the jiggle of a key in the front door.
They left a cupboard of embroidered afternoons.
*
What would you take?
If you had a month, a week, an evening, an hour?
If there were no one looking, no one saying: Don’t take that! Why take that?
What would you take if you thought it was temporary
relocation, transient, provisional, short-term shelter?
If you couldn’t use your ATM card, your credit card, cash in your stock,
sell your home, get a supervisor on the phone, charge your phone.
If you couldn’t keep your phone?

Getting Close

Because my mother loved pocketbooks,
I come alive at the opening click or close of a metal clasp.

& sometimes, unexpectedly, a faux crocodile handle makes me weep.

Breathy clearing of throat, a smooth arm, heels on pavement,
she lingers, sound tattoos.

I go to the thrift store to feel for bobby pins caught in the pocket seam
of a camel hair coat.

I hinge a satin handbag in the crease of my arm. I buy a little
change purse with its curled & fitted snap.

My mother bought this for me. This was my mother’s.

I buy & then I buy & then, another day, I buy something else.
In Paris she had a dog, Bijou, & when they fled Paris, 1942, they left the dog.

When my mother died on February 9, 1983, she left me.

Thirty years later, I am exactly her age.

(purchase from https://fourwaybooks.com/site/paradise/)

Victoria Redel reads selections from Paradise