By LYNNE WEISS
1) Five Names: Before it was destroyed by Cortez, the Aztec city that stood where Mexico City is today was called 1) Tenochtitlan. In the late 18th century the city was known as the 2) City of Palaces because of the grand mansions built by wealthy nobles and merchants. Today it is 3) Ciudad de Mexico or, as the capital of the nation, the 4) Distrito Federal, or 5) Mexico, D.F. (like Washington, DC).
When the compartment door was drawn back, and I saw my room for the nearly twelve-hour trip home, I had to conceal my disappointment. The room was already occupied. Well, no problem. I thought to myself. Coming up to Johannesburg on the train I had been faced with the same problem. Then I had simply asked the conductor if I could change and he had found me a cabin where I could be on my own: to think my own thoughts, laugh out loud at my pettiness and, most importantly, write without distraction – all night if I so chose. Of course, things had been considerably easier on that occasion: my proposed companion had been an elderly white man who smoked like a steam engine and had the watery eyes and puffy nose of a heavy drinker. This time, however, I would have to make excuses for not wanting to share a cabin with a quiet middle-aged black man.
The New York-New Haven train (three or four cars, caboose, and an engine) leaves my hometown for Grand Central Station by day, by night, by day again, clack, clack, clacking through my backyard. Behind the storage tanks of B.J. Dolan’s Home Fuel Oil Company, the train pushes across the swamp meadows. Not so fast that I can’t see the passengers, though Margaret and Muriel and I hide in the tall grass because our mothers have forbidden, very forbidden, playing on the tracks. But fast enough so that the sticky milkweed and Queen Anne’s Lace bend backward, shocked, in the train’s wind wake. And then it’s safe to come out and look for the pennies we’ve laid on the tracks, thinned now, their presidential faces and patriotic mottos erased. These are the dog days of August, and we are the Lost Girls in ponytails, and though we have made a pact—together forever—I keep one eye always on the caboose as I listen for the fire siren that calls us to our five-o’clock suppers in our mothers’ kitchens.
on idyllic Bali in 21stcentury with Frank who keeps talking about Charlie, as we relax in sun-glasses and tee-shirts during our drive across the island, our road traversing numerous picturesque terraced rice paddies, with Frank who periodically rolls down a window of the mini-van to shout “bring ‘em home!” at the oblivious farmers peacefully tending their crops, many of whom are indeed wearing woven grass sun-hats for the heat
The trail never begins level. It’s part of the architecture of a waterfall. A creek or a stream or a river is flowing along its course, and then there is an abrupt change—a fall—that brings the water a little closer to sea level. A little closer to home.
Event Date:
Periodically Speaking at the New York Public Library hosts The Common. Join editor Jennifer Acker in conversation with (and readings by): Brook Wilensky-Lanford; Maura Candela; and Angela Veronica Wong.
Periodically Speaking is “a reading series providing a major venue for emerging writers to present their work while emphasizing the diversity of America’s literary magazines and the magazine collections of The New York Public Library.” Find more information about Periodically Speaking here.
Head to the main branch of the Library and enter at 5th Ave (betwixt the famous lions). Once you’re in the lobby, take a left and walk all the way to the end of the hallway—we’ll be in the last room on the left (Room 108).
Admission is free.
My grandfather lives in a small house in a small town in Denmark—which, as it happens, is a small country. The town is Græse Bakkeby, which boasts a population of 2,300 people, though it is part of the larger Frederikssund townscape. It’s the kind of place no one who visits the country ever really experiences, in part because there’s no reason to, and yet it’s often the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Denmark. The smell and tang and feel of his house is the same as it was in the house he and my grandmother used to live in, in Værløse, before she died in 1999. It’s a mixture of the coffee maker, my grandfather’s cologne, his many annotated books, and the general cleanliness of the place (he is a neat man and takes pride in it). To the sound of the news on the radio or a Mozart concerto I see him scurrying about his little home, well-dressed, a comb in his back pocket, forever clearing his throat. He sips his coffee while squeezing his eyes shut, as if to intensify its flavor. He pulls a volume from the shelf (Ulysses? The Brothers Karamazov? The Magic Mountain?) and revisits his younger self. He thinks of me and my siblings. He thinks of his sons, my father and uncle. He thinks of his wife.
April’s only days
away. The wind strokes
sandstone cliffs, the cove
By ANN ANG
There isn’t much to do here. Wandering into a live military training area, I look for the pungent and prickly durians that fall only in the dead of night.
Lim Chu Kang isn’t a big place, situated as it is in the northwest of Singapore, a diamond shaped island state only 25 kilometres by 48 kilometres. But it gives the impression of space, dotted with orchid farms and odd patches of jungle with flaming red tulip trees from Africa. Botanists refuse to call this secondary forest.
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