- By BENJAMIN ANASTAS I went to buy the Roland Juno-6 with my best friend Michael the summer I was sixteen, before either one of us had a driver’s license. Other boys saved their house-painting money and bought an electric guitar with a starter amp. Or a five-piece drum kit, if they had the kind of parents who tolerated an unholy racket in…
- The mind swings inward on itself in fear Swayed towards nausea from each normal sign. —derek walcott, “A Lesson for This Sunday” On a lake, in the woods, in 1940, my grandparents built a cabin. One room, big stone fireplace, outdoor privy. They lived and worked outside New York City and spent summers in Maine, my grandmother often here alone…
- By JAMIE EDGECOMBE Dr. Nakajima had a poem in his head. It went something like, however far I go, blue mountains. ‘Ah,’ the Doctor thought, ‘I like the style of Taneda Santka. He is modern, yes, but his poems are easy enough to remember in volume. They are neat and simple and great for these summer days when the mountains grow…
- By YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR Prologue He leaps over two fire-painted blossoms resting on the stark cracked city pavement. Roused, these unfurl into late-Christmas-season orange-and-black butterflies that flutter into the violet shade of a smog-encrusted roadside jacaranda tree. A thrum becomes a hum becomes thumping footsteps, and soon he is entangled in a thicket of jeers and tossed gray, black, and brown stones as…
- By MEGAN STAFFEL i. The call came in February. Chipper Hanson had found a lost goat and tied it to his porch, where it was kicking and butting and destroying things. He called the hardware, and the hardware called me, because if nobody got it off his porch soon, his wife was going to get the gun and take care of the…
- By HELEN HOOPER Kirsten entered this particular Starbucks right after her interview at The Wilderness Foundation across the street. It had not gone well. She’d exited into the midmorning glare and crossed the street in the direction the traffic light permitted—she had to go one way or another—and continued through the glass revolving door to the counter, where she ordered a grande…
- By HISHAM BUSTANI Lying suspended over a lake. She can see her entire self on the surface of the water. Every now and then circles appear and expand, distorting the image. At times she looks at her reflection with sadness, at times she chokes with bitterness and tries to escape, to turn over or stand in the air. But it’s no…
- By LUIS CALLEJAS In collaboration with Lateral Office Introduction by Scott Geiger The Faroe Islands are not the rural, subarctic archipelago you imagine. Like their distant peers on the Danish mainland, the Faroese are thoughtful, progressive city-builders. To connect their dispersed communities, their highway system tunnels through basaltic mountains and under North Atlantic waters. Fast ferries and helicopter taxis run between…
- By ESTHER BELL I am a sixth-generation Texan who married a fiercely native New Yorker, which means I have a keen appreciation for the ways in which places shape lives. When I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the dead of winter last year, it was an odyssey that once again challenged my sense of identity. Cincinnati is worlds apart from both…
- By ELEANOR STANFORD aa (pronounced “ah-ah”) ORIGIN: <Hawaiian, ‘a’, “to burn.” 1. Lava that has a rough, jagged, spiny, and generally clinkery surface. 2. How to gloss this sharp language, its reflective surfaces, its chinks? 3. The scripted, theatrical crying at funerals: ah-ah, ah-ah, rising and falling, in clefts and gullies. O nha mae, the women groan, Oh my mother, even…
- By LEIGH NEWMAN I grew up in Alaska, where one thing after another was constantly threatening my young life. Floatplanes stalled. Grizzlies ate our camping supplies. A moose wandering through our backyard got angrier than expected when a kid from school threw a rock at its knees. I wouldn’t say I was cavalier or brave about these experiences, but I didn’t need much…
- By CATHERINE CIEPIELA Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova belong to the last generation of Russian poets formed by the Soviet experience. Born in the 1970s, they are old enough to have visceral memories of Soviet life but young enough to move adeptly with the new influences, new media, and new choices introduced in the post-Soviet era. Educated in Soviet,…
- By POLINA BARSKOVA The dark-winged prostitutes at the bus station in Boston Look like pleasure boats or better sharp-breasted bathing beauties At full sail on the waters of Saint-Malo But this analogy like cheap shorts is too tight And chafes your thighs I wander among these vessels of belligerent desire Knock-off chalices of spleen Ruins heaped gravel of…
- By ANNA GLAZOVA the superior sun will never move chained into itself by the moving heft. for us the sun moves and pulls the heft behind: tree, bare yourself, stream, go underground, someone else, under a rock, and I into skin and wool and fibers of plants packing their body on my back for the winter Translated by…
- By ANNA GLAZOVA thread your fingers through whole hinges if the opening is blocked if there is no new no old moon in the window. behind tight brackets is the crack that one could either be reading by a table lamp or have spilled a full glass; had no time to drink and was sent for stones to wear…
- By MARIA STEPANOVA For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. Ps. 50:10 . . . And the vixen ascends, staggering, On all her cinnamon-colored fours. And the bear shifts his vision forward, As if it’s a hop-fingered hand. And the deer seem older than their own skins, And the polar owls…
- By RON WELBURN for Francis Martin (Nauset/Nipmuc) Blind at night in the forest, you are right about fear and what it does to you there, how fluids and adrenaline fix the eyes on what the mind cannot accept. And this explains it all: How when they came here the thick forests unnerved them, How they couldn’t find each other…
- By RON WELBURN for Don Cheney When you know a hard sky the surface of a stone sea, the texture of popcorn foil. When its belly sonograms across the eyes and face, the tissues of heaven static above fields and asphalt. When each crevice moves in petrified motion, lock-cloud where there is no cloud, lock-cloud when the hard sky arrives…
- By MARIA TERRONE Even tight, feared spaces can expand, morphing from the past into the fuzz of nostalgia, which I’ll try to avoid here, e.g., #1, me at 16, looking for the “model studio” listed in the Manhattan Yellow Pages. Toting a portfolio, I climb the stairs of a West 40s walkup worn as another century. “Models?” “No, that’s Cheekie,…
- By REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS In an alternate universe where Charles Ramsey never gets five minutes of fame because he mentions slavery instead of McDonalds. Charles Ramsey did five years for beating on his wife and read Battle Cry of Freedom, Destruction of Black Civilization, some bell hooks, some Sonia Sanchez, some Fred Douglass, this book list he got from a feminist…
- By PAULA BOHINCE The nature of a hedge is to be high. To obscure. Look, berries have appeared overnight, like arson, a smolder of nest rests in the ivy like a rowboat gone over some falls. I was wary, too wary, of the Tuileries’ mazes, man- made spirals where boys and…
- By JEFFREY HARRISON It’s come to this: I’m helping flowers have sex, crouching down on one knee to insert a Q-tip into one freckled foxglove bell after another, without any clue as to what I’m doing—which, come to think of it, is always true the first time with sex. And soon Randy Newman’s early song “Maybe I’m Doing it Wrong”…
- By JEFFREY HARRISON When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap and leans down over the sink and turns his head sideways to drink directly from the stream of cool water, I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone, who used to do the same thing at that age; …
- By OLIVER DE LA PAZ The boy in the labyrinth leans into the dark’s sweet kiss. Cave-ins from somewhere in the tunnels send gusts of wind into the boy’s face. The boy imagines a wheel spins in his brain that makes the cavern shake. The rhythm of it turns in the spirals of the boy’s ear. Sound made thicker in the…
- By OLIVER DE LA PAZ The boy in the labyrinth bends to the darkness. Closes his eyes. Imagines that it lies to him. Because it is full of lies. Because at the center of the darkness is a man who is also a bull. And he is curled up at the hub of it all. The boy thinks about the man-bull…
- By BRENDAN GALVIN It might be a skirt girls wear for Beltane or another pastoral occasion, in Eastern Europe perhaps. You might see them whirling in a painting by one of the Generalic brothers, maybe, “Spring Festival at Hlebine,” floralia we couldn’t name gracing the air about their ankles. That morning a mother probably…
- By DENISE DUHAMEL You are fishing on the bay, your cigars and tobacco on the dining room table, as I climb the steep russet stairs to Bishop’s childhood bedroom, painted aqua like motels in Florida, which she called the state with the prettiest name. The quilt is peach and rose and tan. There’s a tiny slate like the one on…
- By L. S. KLATT Permit me to apply these squares of American cheese to my spacesuit. Is it that I am a man? Or crazed? How will such a man make it in space, the consuming fire of reentry, & the joy of it? I am a fat man. American. Vienna sausages have always been sweet music to my fingers, yet the Germanics have done…
- By L. S. KLATT You don’t fall far from the tree. Is that because you are adamant? In Adam’s fall/ we fell all, bruised? Software? What keeps us processing even if besotted? Knowledge? What’s the big idea? Is it my soul in your interface? Me? Little i? My jot is a worm, my dot a wormhole. This hole attend/ my life…
- By PETER FILKINS As the deaf-mute grocery clerk puckers curious to a chorus “O” to ask what kind of mushrooms he should be ringing up, I think of Ortiz and last night’s double sailing like a lit-up vowel toward the bleachers in center-left, the outfielder unsure if it might carry The Monster…
- By JOSHUA MEHIGAN This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry. This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams. Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour. Then, for five blocks, not much but chain-link fences. These foolish things, here today, gone today, yesterday, forty years ago, tomorrow. Deloreses and Normas…
- By ANDREA SCOTT And the clucking tongue of a woman in her black chador . . . And the feeling that this may be less than what’s real . . . I cannot translate what the old man has said, grinning toothless from the computer screen. He’s cursing the Mullahs and all that’s hypocritically…
- By DAVID GAVIN About twelve years ago I went into a museum in southern Turkey: Antalya, a resort town on the Mediterranean. I’m not really the type of person who hangs around museums looking at artifacts behind glass: swords and scabbards, shields, frayed bits of clothing, shards of pottery, urns, jewelry, etc. But here I was in Turkey surrounded by…
- By WILLIAM WENTHE A sound I hope to hear no more than once—faint chime, small ring produced by a wedding ring, rose-gold, flung five flights to the cobbles of Rue Valadon from the closet-sized kitchen where, wrung dry, come to the end of endurance and all sense of possibility, I had thrown it out…
- By ROWAN MOORE GERETY A few months before I moved in, Serge was sitting in his house cleaning an AK-47 when it went off in his lap. Looking down, he found his hands were still intact, and he decided then and there to stop selling weapons. On the French mainland, he’d gone to school for aitiopathy, a form of physical therapy that…
- By TYLER SAGE 1. He wakes from dreams of killing. Heavy timber. Shaggy forms moving through the rocks, the alpine flowers. A plane passing overhead in his sleep, in his dreams, a silver spot against the sky. He raises the rifle. He wakes and is in the night. The animals fade, the air thickens. He is alone and paralyzed, and he wakes, and…
- By JOSHUA MEHIGAN Hard to believe that, after all of it, in bed for good now, knowing you haven’t done one thing of any lasting benefit or grasped how to be happy, or had fun, you must surrender everything and pass into a new condition that is not night, or a country, or a sleep, or peace, but nothing,…
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Contents
“The Common Statement” by Jennifer Acker
Fiction
“from Dust” by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
“Mischief” by Megan Staffel
“Blue Mountains” by Jamie Edgecombe
“They Called It Shooting Then” by Tyler Sage
“Meetings” by Helen Hooper
“Freefall in a Shattered Mirror” by Hisham Bustani (Translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes)
Images
“Peaks and Valleys: Klaksvik City Center, Faroe Islands” by Lateral Office with Luis Callejas (Introduction by Scott Geiger)
“The Art Palace of the West” by Esther Bell
Essays
“Boys with a Synth” by Benjamin Anastas
“Well-Armed” by Rowan Gerety Moore
“Geology Primer (Fogo, Cape Verde)” by Eleanor Stanford
“Big Not-So-Bad Wolves” by Leigh Newman
Poetry
“After the USSR (Three Russian Poets)” Introduction by Catherine Ciepiela
“The Act of Darkness” by Polina Barskova (Translated by Catherine Ciepiela)
“the superior sun will never move” by Anna Glazova (Translated by Anna Khasin)
“thread your fingers through whole hinges” by Anna Glazova (Translated by Anna Khasin)
“The Zoo” by Maria Stepanova
“Seeing in the Dark” by Ron Welburn
“When You Know a Hard Sky” by Ron Welburn
“Models & Marie Antoinette: Two Escapes” by Maria Terrone
“Alternate Charles Ramsey” by Reginald Dwayne Betts
“The Nature of a Hedge” by Paula Bohince
“Cross-Fertilization” by Jeffrey Harrison
“A Drink of Water” by Jefrey Harrison
“Labyrinth 75” by Oliver de la Paz
“Labyrinth 76” by Oliver de la Paz
“Mayhem” by Brendan Galvin
“Love Poem with Elizabeth Bishop (Great Village, Nova Scotia)” by Denise Duhamel
“Kraft” by L. S. Klatt
“Apple” by L. S. Klatt
“O” by Peter Filkins
“How Strange, How Sweet” by Joshua Mehigan
“Believe It” by Joshua Mehigan
“Arab Springs” by Andrea Scott
“Aphrodite” by David Gavin
“Error Upon Me Proved” by William Wenthe
Issue 6
