Then our hearts grew claws
and we lived in a cold reach,
Lobster Trap
April 26, 2021
Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry
Olive Amdur
The Grain in the Rectangle
April 26, 2021
Essays, Issue 21, Issue 21 Essays
By LORE SEGAL
from The Journal I Did Not Keep
If I had kept a journal in the early fifties, when I was new in New York, I would have marked the day on which I saw the basalt bowl in a store window in Greenwich Village. It was small, and had an in-curling rim and the finest matte black finish. It cost fifteen dollars, almost half my monthly salary, so I got back on the subway and went home. I could not get the thing out of my mind. I desired it. “Beauty,” Stendhal said, “is the promise of happiness.” There was the Saturday I took the subway to the Village, but my bowl was gone.
It might have been twenty years later when I could afford the large basalt platter with a rim that flattens outward. It was a handsome piece, but it did not redeem the thwarted love for that first small black bowl.
Light Ranger
April 26, 2021
Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry
By L.S. KLATT
I would kill for the feeling of television.
I felt it once. I felt it holster light.
I felt it clutch me in the dark and treble
my house. All the houses. I felt the firefight
Piano Movers
April 26, 2021
Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry
Two Men and a Truck are here to haul our
piano away to a nice woman’s
house, who’s agreed to move it to own
it, so her children can learn to play. An hour
early, two men in the truck pass a pipe
while on my open porch I read
the sports page. I see ribbons of smoke peel
from the open truck window. The ripe
nigrescence
April 26, 2021
Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry
She is on her knees in the garden. The sun, as of yesterday, an hour early. There are no dead snails in the saucers of beer, though she has finally seen the pale-yellow cabbage butterfly. Searching the half-eaten mustards and turnips, she looks for the caterpillars and their eggs as if she were inspecting a child for lice. Extracts the first, hiding along the stem of the most mature start. Studying its curl on her finger for a breath, perhaps peering its translucence to judge it female, before she presses. Leaf by leaf plant by plant until her fingertips are dirty with the mess.
Sun Through Snow
April 26, 2021
Issue 21, Issue 21 Poetry, Poetry
Turner could have done no better,
nor did he, articulating the light
made now radiant, prismatic:
The Ache of the Sands
April 26, 2021
Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 21, Issue 21 Fiction, Translation
By ABDELAZIZ ERRACHIDI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF
The Bedouin’s Journey
I know a man whose heart is instructed in Bedouin life. He knows the desert and its moods, and has learned early on that it doesn’t like to be challenged. I know him walking without pause, teaching his feet and his heart the ways, walking slowly and deliberately, the trails trembling beneath him. Aimlessly he digs into the sand of the earth and settles nowhere, for his early existence taught him that a real Bedouin doesn’t settle except in death. He may pause, but if he does, life sneaks up on him with its poison. With every pause comes an ache. The trick is not to overcome life’s problems, but to understand its laws.
Nights of a Thousand Candles
April 14, 2021
Dispatches
The Solidarity Book Project
March 30, 2021
Studio
By SONYA CLARK
The Solidarity Book Project was envisioned by Professor of Art and Art History Sonya Clark, as one way for Amherst College, in its Bicentennial year, to recommit to a more equitable future by pushing against legacies of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism.
March 2021 Poetry Feature: Sylvie Durbec
March 25, 2021
Poetry, Translation
Poem by SYLVIE DURBEC, translated from the French by DENIS HIRSON
Sylvie Durbec was born in Marseille and lives in Provence, near Avignon. She writes texts in both prose and poetry, as well as painting and making collages. The many books she has published over the past twenty years include the prose-poetry memoire Marseille : éclats et quartiers (Marseille, fragments and quarters) which won the prestigious Jean Follain prize; Prendre place (Taking place) concerning the internment camp at Douadic in France and Soutine, a prose-poem about the painter, published in The Common. This year she has published 50 carrés du jour (50 squares of the day) and Ça qui me poursuit (That which pursues me).
Denis Hirson grew up in South Africa and has lived in France since 1975. He has published nine books, several concerning the memory of South Africa under apartheid. The latest, both published in 2017, are Footnotes for the Panther, ten conversations with William Kentridge, and Ma langue au chat, in French, concerning the torture and delight of speaking and writing in that language.
Table of Contents
- The Ignorance of Beasts
The Ignorance of Beasts
I still don’t know how to type a tilde on a computer keyboard
when writing the name of a Spanish or Portuguese writer I love.
Nor do I know what poetry is.
