Jaimie Gusman appeared in Issue 38 with two poems: Still life with Courtney Love and Driving out. Both works move through unstable domestic and geographic spaces where memory, grief, travel, desire, and ordinary objects acquire unusual pressure. This page preserves Gusman's place in the historical archive and guides readers through the two contributions.
Jaimie Gusman in Issue 38
Gusman's two poems share a strong interest in places that refuse to stay emotionally neutral. Homes, motels, roads, bedrooms, gardens, construction zones, beaches, and distant cities collect traces of relationships and loss. The physical world becomes a field of memory, with objects and locations carrying the emotional force of people who are absent or receding.
The poems also rely on abrupt associative movement. A gesture, a landscape detail, a household object, or a remembered journey can redirect the speaker within a few lines. That motion gives both pieces a dreamlike continuity while keeping their images rooted in recognizable American settings.
Still life with Courtney Love
Still life with Courtney Love centers on a haunted domestic landscape. The speaker moves among a home, a motel-like sense of displacement, photographs, a garden, bodily memory, and the persistent presence of a ghost. Familiar surroundings become charged by grief and by the effort to live beside what remains emotionally unresolved.
The poem's title places celebrity culture at the edge of this private scene, while the body of the work concentrates on personal aftermath. Musical and visual associations mingle with anatomical language, household details, religious objects, and garden imagery. The result is a still life whose objects feel active with memory.
Movement gradually becomes a form of recovery. The speaker imagines the body regaining its ability to walk forward as the poem measures attachment through bones, force, distance, and ritual. Grief is presented as something embedded in space and matter.
Driving out
Driving out begins beside unfinished road construction and expands into a sequence of remembered destinations. Orlando, Cocoa Beach, Atlanta, the Atlantic coast, bedrooms, roads, and temporary interiors form a map of departure and return. The car becomes the poem's moving frame, carrying the speaker through places associated with intimacy, risk, and separation.
The poem repeatedly joins travel with domestic scenes. A worker imagines home, a wife prepares breakfast, a baby is bathed, a lover leaves and returns, and a final written message hovers near the possibility of ending. These fragments create a geography of relationships whose emotional meaning changes with every stop.
The moon provides one of the poem's recurring measures of distance. Its imagined position shifts closer to houses, attics, roads, and feet, giving the landscape an intimate scale. The closing wordplay turns a familiar romantic phrase into a physical fall, linking affection with exhaustion and instability.
Memory, place, and motion
Read together, Gusman's two the historical archive poems form a compact study of memory moving through physical space. One stays close to the haunted atmosphere of home and burial. The other follows roads, temporary rooms, cities, and departures. Both use concrete settings to carry emotional histories that remain active inside the present.
The poems also show how contemporary verse can make ordinary American locations feel psychologically unstable through compression and associative leaps.
Gusman’s the historical archive record
Author: Jaimie Gusman
Works: Still life with Courtney Love; Driving out
Publication: the historical archive, Issue 38