By AMAR MITRA
Translated by ANISH GUPTA
ONE
Ask Kartik. He will show you.
Ask Kartik how Hrithik Roshan, the film star, sings, how he walks, and Kartik, the neighbourhood tailor, will show you how he sings and how he walks.
Ask him to show you how superstar Shah Rukh Khan proposes to matinee queen Kajol, when and how he delivers those romantic dialogues, and Kartik’s imitation of Khan will make your jaw drop.
There is no time to complain,
only time to move as fast as you can
through the rows of low-lying shrubs,
the tall stalks.
The people of the fields leave
the complaining to the rest of us,
driving by on our way to work,
school,
the gym.
Es de madrugada.
It is dawn always dawn
the sun breaking through
the breaking of the soil.
The faint smell of rain from irrigated dirt
crusts of mud from the crop rows
comes home with my father
on his pants and beneath his fingernails.
By ELLYN GAYDOS
I live on a wooded road posted with NO TRESPASSING PROPERTY OF GEORGE FUDGE signs. In addition to being a large landowner, George Fudge rents out dumpsters, and is rumored to be an ex-con and confirmed to be a minister. When the season is right, he plows snow. He’s plowed my driveway more than once for free. I am surrounded by good intentions. On the wall of the post office there is a note that says, I am an honest girl, written by a customer who took a card costing $2.99 and left $3. The town maintains a free rack of clothing outside the dollar store, kids’ jumpers and XL T-shirts fluttering brightly.
I work on a small vegetable farm carved out of hayfields owned by the local high school and woods owned by the local commune. The other young farmers and I grow food for a hundred families that come each week to get shares of vegetables, which begin in spring as ephemeral greens and end in winter as sacks of beets and potatoes.
Home from work with a heavy trash bag of compost for my pigs, I find the escaped animals locked in the chicken coop. They got out in the unwatchful summer afternoon, their snouts bending up the bottom of the fence to roam undeterred past illegible PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. They were escaping their squalid pen out of pure misery, I think. I had been watching them get shocked trying to push through, seeming genuinely angry, for the past few days, putting off moving the fence out of laziness or a desire to escape the drudgery of what I’d taken on.
This feature is part of our print and online portfolio of writing from the immigrant farmworker community. Read more online or in Issue 26.
Part of a day’s harvest, 1985.
I stood behind the orthopedic specialist and watched the giant monitor where my MRI reports glowed. He traced the contours of my spine, his index finger waving back and forth down the screen. I had gotten his name after a months-long battle with neck and back pain. What started as fire and numbness in my right arm grew into a welter of spasm and neuropathy. This doctor was known as an oracle of back pain. He bragged of being able to guess how people used their bodies just from reading his screens.
The exhaustion of having a nameless, and, therefore, untreatable problem was eroding my spirit. I needed him to find the answer. As he squinted, he rattled off his wins, spotting the bone-wear patterns of golfers, softball players, fiddlers, and software developers. He stopped to identify the small bumps on each vertebra: bone spurs. It felt like he was stalling. Had I stumped him?
By DIPIKA MUKHERJEE
Reviewed by LYNNE MCENIRY
“Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are,” suggests philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Based on her collection Dialect of Distant Harbors, Dipika Mukherjee would agree, I believe, but “landscapes” here would have to be plural, because in addition to geographical landscapes, these poems embrace multiple settings, languages, weather, generations, relationships, and traditions and rituals, both spiritual and secular. Through experiences both lived and dreamed, her poems invite the reader to discover beauty, danger, and heartbreak by exploring new worlds and revealing heart-stopping moments of intimacy. The harbors she describes are distant but never forgotten, both welcoming and estranging.
Although they are not named or numbered, we can see by the choice of extra spacing between each group of five to seven poems in the table of contents that Mukherjee has created seven sections for this collection. Throughout the book, each section is separated by a graceful lotus mandala, similar to those that adorn sacred texts and women’s hands hennaed for special occasions. These seven symbolic pauses serve as a constant reminder of the overarching message of healing, resilience, and rebirth in all the poems carefully gathered here. They also invite the reader to pay special attention to seven central themes: generational roots, the misogyny and physical torture women suffer, the passing of time, the horrific violence of racial and cultural hate, mortality, migration and exile, and the value of travel.
By AMMI KELLER
For Rachel, the plague ended in May of 2021, on the day she again touched a stranger.
This stranger appeared when Rachel entered the clothing optional area of Dessert Springs. The name was a pun, the resort’s sign featuring a cartoon girl reclining in a banana split boat. Only two of the nine hot tubs were occupied, both by white women naked except for full suits of what appeared to be rockabilly tattoos. Rachel and her wife SJ, both one month vaccinated, started filling their stock tubs. Then, as Rachel walked past the women on her way to the outdoor shower, they laughed.
By MAHA HASSAN
Translated from the Arabic by ADDIE LEAK.
Piece appears below in both English and Arabic.
Translator’s Note:
When In Anne Frank’s House (Al-Mutawassit, 2020) was published, it was met with near radio silence—a strange reaction to a new book by a celebrated author. In an interview I conducted with Hassan in fall 2021, she suggested that this reaction was one of fear. The fact that many in the Arab world conflate Judaism with Zionism—and Israeli oppression—means that writing about a young Jewish martyr like Anne Frank was automatically taboo, and any response to Hassan’s book would be wading into murky waters. Hassan was accused of writing about Anne Frank to court international favor, and the memoir was automatically labeled as political. In my later attempts to locate a publisher for the English translation, I came across a similar hesitation and mistrust—concern, among other things, that an author from an Arab country might not treat Anne Frank with the respect she deserves.
New poems by R. ZAMORA LINMARK, KEVIN CRAFT, and COLE W. WILLIAMS
Table of Contents:
—R. Zamora Linmark, “Under the Influence”
—Kevin Craft, “Basin and Range” and “Or Later We Become Our Parents”
—Cole W. Williams “Gombe”
Under the Influence
By R. Zamora Linmark
After watering the baby navel orange tree
rosemary and sage I left the garden before
the rain returned and sped to Ala Moana mall
after my brother told me nothing beats retail
shopping under the influence of grief
especially when everything from Spring must go
so wail flail your arms wildly like a child drowning
stomp in your black leather sandals for Gethsemane
but for Pete’s sake please pedicure first
you want your sorrow to be of first rate honey
equated with Achilles and not Manchego cheese-
like heels then hit Zara and buy that slim-fitted
charcoal-gray pants with matching coat
you’ve been dreaming of that varsity jock
letterman jacket with green sleeves and decal
in Greek one size smaller if available
a perfect motivator to wake up very early
in the morning load the Biki bike with your inflatable
board and oars and balancing between choppy
waters and gusty winds paddle from one end
of the beach to the next just a little after sunrise.
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