Issue 8

Our Poor Perishable World
By BRIAN SHOLIS In a photograph Robert Adams took northeast of Riverside, California, in 1982, serpentine paths lead toward the horizon line; it’s not easy to discern whether these are creeks, dirt trails, or roads. Human presence takes the form of wooden poles carrying electric wires, which stride diagonally from the bottom left of the composition toward the distance at right.…
Burden
By JAMES BYRNE for Yusef Komunyakaa Downtown, already snagged between two countries, I make stock footage for an English return—block after block, hobbling in unwalkable shoes, uptown from the Ground Zero memorial where, today, Obama laid wreaths and tousled the head of Cannizzaro: a one-year-old boy on 9/11. “You look just like your father,” said the…
Trouble on the Road Again
By ISHION HUTCHINSON Scavenging down the blue potholed hill, rocking out of cobalt acid, they steam chromatic, these Elijahs in their cloud wheels, fatherless and man-killing, their guts bloated with red heat, lice, cast-iron-soldiers who frighten you into a jacaranda’s scattered stare, making your poor heart rain, every day trembling from the exhalation of their shunting furnaces without backseats, only…
Vers de Societe
By ISHION HUTCHINSON Some meager talk of Larkin over quiche and pâté, olives the proclaimed ragamuffin picked at as though our lives; circumspect, the neutral host blanched at pills and diaphragm, shook her clipped head of frost, insisted he please change from that cold brute, to where life is modest, the islands, perhaps, not this social phalanx; but he…
Starving the Mustangs
By ELIZABETH METZGER Never again will I feed the mustangs my mind, Outstretched in the grey moon of morning. Ours is a ritual of nevers, the lung's nocturne Keeping me awake. In a pang of streetlight My mother is alive. White elms hurl their forms Against the glass. In the coldest room She…
Excoriating Ghosts
By NEIL SHEPARD June’s consuming, stripping down darkness to its thinnest hours, swallowing sleep. Not the fireflies, not the moon, not the deer stripping apple trees, not the cemetery stones beyond them, are as ravenous for my wakefulness. First light and the Harvard landscaper comes to plan dawn memories for this place—“a past you’d have planted had you lived here…
The Origamist
By DANIEL TOBIN The Cat’s Eye Nebula—one could begin there as a way of showing how being folds in upon itself, always to form new configurations. That’s where we’re from, the vast compounded into the covert as if all were the sum of a hidden vector; and why I ply my art without a staple, shaping each shear assemblage of…
Burial at Shanidar
By ELIZABETH HAZEN Pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves suggests that Neanderthals, too, buried flowers with their dead. The pollen could be mere coincidence— traces left by a prehistoric rat that ate flowers near the grave—but we prefer believing cavemen buried blossoms there. See the bereaved weeping? Over foothills she lumbers.…
The Common Statement
By JENNIFER ACKER To get anywhere from the borgo—the walled-in cluster of medieval houses and skinny lanes connecting the castle, the church, and a tiny grassy square—one must go steeply downhill and then steeply up. Each morning, I choose a different high point from which to take in the magnetic hills of this corner of Lunigiana in northwest Tuscany, where friends…
Reichelt's Parachute
By IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE His name was Gustave Eiffel, and he built his giant French tower because it was impossible—that is what everyone said—to build something so tall. They said the tower would topple under its own weight. Or the wind would blow, the metal would bend, and the rivets would snap. The tower would plunge into the city. At night Gustave…
Clouds
By ANTONIO TABUCCHI Translated by MARTHA COOLEY and ANTONIO ROMANI — You stay here in the shade all day, said the young girl, don’t you like going in the water? The man gave a vague nod that could have meant yes or no, but said nothing. —Can I use tu with you?, asked the girl. —If I’m not mistaken,…
Stewardship
By EDMUND SANDOVAL It’s easy to forget you once had control. That you stopped making decisions for yourself. Part of that’s getting older, and I’ve gotten older—not much, but some. It’s what comes with settling down and making some sort of life and having children. And that’s something. We all know that. But then there’s the bad part of…
The Dying of the Deads
By JEFF JACKSON Part One. A Map of Everything Swallowed They start drinking three hours before the funeral. Tequila, mostly. A bottle and a half later, their heads are buzzing on some private wavelength. Hazy shapes slither in front of their eyes. Words sound furry in their ears. This is precisely the idea. They don’t want to see the casket.…
Caleta Beach
By NANI POWER 1. Papi say we goin on a real vacation and Milky say Vegas and me, Tippy, I say Disney and then Carlo say Nueva York but no, say Papi, we gots to go to Acapulco. I say you mean Mexico and he say sí, cabrón, like I’m a dumbass. Carlo crackin up. I say why we got to see…
Am I Speaking to Hyman Roth?
By ANTONIO MONDA Early that morning his telephone had begun ringing nonstop, and he found himself thanking directors, casting directors, producers, actors, and all the members of the Actors Studio. He’d seen many of his actors receive Oscar nominations, but when he heard his name among the 1974 nominees for The Godfather: Part II, Lee Strasberg was astounded. The callers…
Bratislava
By MARY JO SALTER So I’m still alive and now I’m in Bratislava. That’s funny. I hadn’t expected to be alive. A sign in italics nudges us at the station: Have an amazing time in Bratislava! That’s funny: a straight-faced wish, offered in English and then Slovakian, posted above the trash can that stands like the only monument in town.…
Our Poor Perishable World
By BRIAN SHOLIS In a photograph Robert Adams took northeast of Riverside, California, in 1982, serpentine paths lead toward the horizon line; it’s not easy to discern whether these are creeks, dirt trails, or roads. Human presence takes the form of wooden poles carrying electric wires, which stride diagonally from the bottom left of the composition toward the distance at…
Death of the Farm Family
By SARAH SMARSH It was unlikely that Betty and Jeannie would end up in the country. They’d always moved within cities—Wichita, Chicago, Denver, Dallas—and neighboring small towns. And it was unlikely they’d stay for long. They first hit the road when Betty was a teenager and Jeannie a baby, and by the time Jeannie was in high school they’d changed…
Talmudic Lesson: God's Smile
By ILAN STAVANS There is one story that has always held a strange allure for me. It appears in Genesis 25:19 to 28:9 and is about Jacob’s theft of Esau’s birthright. Every time I read it, I feel haunted. In old age, a blind Isaac asks Esau, his oldest son, to visit him. He makes it understood that the end…
Stepping Off
By RALPH SNEEDEN “And we went on living it, like a wave, that doesn’t know it is at every moment different water.” —Alan Williamson, from “A Childhood Around 1950” In 1967 I almost drowned when I wandered from a sandbar and dropped into a deep cleft. That particular summer on the Jersey Shore, my older sisters had taken to riding…
Untitled
By TADEUSZ DĄBROWSKI Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONE Down a long corridor walks the surgeon, he’s just finished operating on my father. He’s walked that way for years now, while inside me hope is trying on a black and a white dress by turns. At home I left behind, daddy, your death—a rabid dog, which I hate, but which I feed, to…
The Well
By TADEUSZ DĄBROWSKI Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES A night train glides like a bobsleigh down the gutter of winter, down a valley wreathed in the amber glow of sleep, a nameless little town, where I first touched the breasts of A., not entirely certain if that could make her pregnant. December, the late nineteen-nineties. On a marketplace speckled with little…
Untitled
By TADEUSZ DĄBROWSKI Translated by ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES Harvard Professor Emeritus, thank you for coming to my reading, though you had so many other attractions to choose from, upstairs Šalamun was speaking, Pamuk two doors down. Thank you for coming, although you started to snore before I started to read, and you woke up again at the applause. It was wonderful to…
Song of Almería
By JOHN POCH Our bus downshifts cresting a hill, and a partridge covey flushes into the lit mist of the autumn noon, clouds spilling over higher hills slow and white like soft glaciers cut by massive stones the size of fortresses, and just as cold. But here, a goatherd in a great orange sweater appears like a camouflaged god and…
Phylum
By LARISSA SHMAILO Came a homeless man, without a foot, dressed up in a new canvas sack, tied up with a belt in the usual style, and an Alfalfa tower of hair (all in soot) with lint in the vertical layers. He was walking down Fifth and he put down his bags by…
Heroin Chic
By GERRY LAFEMINA Pin prick of pink in the solution to ensure you struck a vein, before you push the plunger in. Brief burn then spreading numbness, a lingering... let’s name it exhaustion. You’ve made a map of minor overdoses—you call it napping, that nodding out. I’ve seen it all before: syringes like…
Caged Bird Society
By GERRY LAFEMINA All the small griefs, the petty slights, the imagined worst things, he’s placed them each in its own little cage, set them on stands & tables throughout the house for their easy company. Some perch on the swing, head cocked. Some peck at the water dish & scratch at the…
Morning Salutation for Joe Brainard
By R. ZAMORA LINMARK It’s only 6 a.m. and already my sun salutation is ten minutes behind mountain standard time just means more room for a quickie if it’s on the menu why not ponder the big When over pot of chickpeas or on purple mat work towards the ultimate corpse pose I love and kill for mornings like this…
Homeward
By ROBERT CORDING One of those words from another time, I think, as my walk circles back towards my house, the wind, an accomplice with the cold this late November day, filming my eyes with tears. The sun’s bounce is gone. It’s resigned to going down earlier each day, and sinks slowly over the pond towards December’s bottom. When a…
Yes or Know?
By SYLVIE DURBEC Translated by DENIS HIRSON On the unbolted gate to the garden of the dead I wrote Voi che entrate and was pulled short swift and sharply As the strain of writing in an unknown tongue rather than My own already foreign since come down from my father And mother each…
A Little Man
By SYLVIE DURBEC Translated by DENIS HIRSON A little man walks Through the golden dust It is a summer’s morning A morning fresh and mild As other mornings, other sorrows He walks across roads Where no one else walks With a tiny wooden coffin Tucked under his arm Is it empty? Is it…
Wordsworth in Poughkeepsie
By MACEO J. WHITAKER Expostulate up! up! Route 9, Will. Ignore the totality of immortality. Drink up this anti-pastoral. Hail the Just-a-Buck and Minnow Motors. Praise the bifurcation of river + city. Honor the grit, the skylight plywood, The attic rats and wall roaches. Greet the vagrant dwellers walking Route(s) 44/55, forked, joint,…
What But Dignity in the Vigil
By STEPHEN HAVEN The night nurse quibbling with the old GP: The lobbied family becalmed around Everything morphined: They more or less agree But not when the coroner calks the door, Their cargo embargoed, down to the last apple, Scurvy in the hold. Realtors, creditors conjugate The numbers of their deep harbors: Always room To pay some more, foam from…
Orderly Squads of Flowers in the Chaos of Existence
By STEPHEN HAVEN Night-drunk bees s(t)unned on October’s panes, Their dried husks in the windshield of a late-night thought, Home is just a breadth of road away. Each limousine the pinwheel of a funeral. 50% cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The night nurse easing your thin bottom Cold to your last commode. Or the telescope That once outdated Hubble. Each prayer. Each…
Shy Mother
By JONATHAN GERHARDSON You wear those shoes like a shy mother. You are a shy mother. Mother, it’s snobbish nonsense; all these chanson tramps just prance prance prance about town like their names were Shawn Johnson while you’re at home with your shy shy shoes and your Johnson & Johnson & Johnson. Rest assured, that whole louche show ain’t…
Dear 2Pac
By JONATHAN MOODY I begin with Byron & Tennyson & watch my students bury their heads on desks; they rest easier than the deceased. Dear 2PAC, it’s me against the world of Indifference. I display your photo on the projector: your arms tatted up; your iced-out- diamond Death Row pendant glaring against the black backdrop like the tunnel of…
Hiking South Mountain
By CYNTHIA HOGUE Arid stick of trail, waving ocotillo: O mottled cactus branch pointing beyond the pictographs of water sources—sun-like spirals, deer drinking— you scan but cannot find. The eagle’s come a second time to float on wind in slow circles of descent until he’s ten feet overhead banking to look you straight in the eye: You look back curious,…
Pareidolia
By R. A. VILLANUEVA When the new year came with whole flocks of doves and jackdaws falling dead upon the fields, landfills and roofs blackened with wings; the lakes silvered with drumfish, their bellies bloated, eyes thickened to milk. The ministers sang of seals and omens, sang of prophecies above tambourines and horns. For starlings they cried, for spiders…
Epithalamion, Memorial Day
By R.A. VILLANUEVA Forecasts say prepare for rain, so you will— will keep at the ready tarp and cord, tents and candles. And you will drink to the gulls circling and the May sun high above rocks ahead of you which promise everything will be just fine. That this is for good. That…
Dutch Joe
By TERESE SVOBODA Land sakes is what we’re always exclaiming, because land is all we’re good for, all the sakes there are or ever will be. Each of us, fifty or so strong, has left a country crowded with kin or else lorded over, every inch of the land spoken for, down to the last hop of hare or squawk…