Sarah Wu

A Child Playing Between Checkpoints

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By HOMOUD ALSHAIYJE
Translated from the Arabic by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

We were happy children. Fear didn’t stop us from doing what we wanted whenever we wanted. The clock had no place in our daily lives, as long as we were armed by play and by the secret weapon of Allah y-saʿdak, that Iraqi phrase that we used as a password to keep the soldiers at bay.

But when it came to rescuing me from the claws of a heart sickness that sent me to the hospital, twenty-nine years after the invasion, the password didn’t work. In truth, I don’t know what struck me. It seemed that my heart could no longer contain the force of all the memories of the days of the invasion, when I was a nine-year-old who spent most of his time playing football or riding a bicycle. The stream of images pushed my heart rate to over 160 irregular beats per minute. As doctors struggled to figure out the reason, I myself was certain of it.

Sorrow of Phoenix

May 4, 2023 Poetry, Translation

By CHO JI HOON
Translated from the Korean by SEKYO NAM HAINES

Translator’s note:

Cho Ji Hoon’s “Sorrow of Phoenix” appeared eleven months before the Pearl Harbor attack in the literary magazine Moonjang in 1940. This poem, along with “Old Fashioned Dress” and “Monk Dance,” published a year earlier, are considered to be among his major works. Born in 1920, Cho Ji Hoon grew up under Japan’s oppressive colonial rule after the demise of Chosun Dynasty in 1910 and has said that the foundation of his poetry was his attachment to what was vanishing from his native culture. He longed for the beauty of traditional Korea.

The Candidate

April 13, 2023 Fiction

By J.G. JESMAN

The CV was impressive—though littered with old language. The candidate crammed his opening letter with words like “abreast,” “canonically,” “mammoth,” and other unusual— no, very un-African turns of phrase. For example, in the summary of his academic paper, Malpractices in Traditional Authority Leadership, he wrote: “…for the chiefs to gain community trust, Caesar’s wife must remain above suspicion.” As you can imagine, the candidate stood out. He astonished the interviewing panel at St. Thomas Secondary School in Malowena. It made them picture their old president Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, addressing the nation in Received Pronunciation. Why should a Malawian man of twenty-seven speak of former duties being “orchestrated with much aplomb?”

Review: Bilbao-New York-Bilbao

March 22, 2023 Reviews

By KIRMEN URIBE
Translated by ELIZABETH MACKLIN
Reviewed by NATASHA AYAZ

There is an undeniable poetry to transportation. The reverie of a train roping across land, the intrepidity of a boat charting depthless waters, the surrealism of an aircraft cutting through cloud—all tracing paths like storylines across terrain, all positioning the passenger as an Odyssean protagonist. In Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, Kirmen Uribe takes the family novel to the skies. Originally written in Basque and published in 2008, this latest edition was published in 2022—translated by American poet Elizabeth Macklin and featuring an incisive new foreword by Lebanese-American writer Youmna Chlala. The first of Uribe’s four novels, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao won the 2009 National Prize for Literature in Spain. True to the timelessly familial tendency of many debut novels, its narrative pulse is Uribe’s desire to excavate his ancestral past, collaging testimonies from disparate historical voices into a cohesive portrait.

On Drowning

March 21, 2023 Essays

By LONNIE LARSEN

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”
-Norman MacLean

1.

On a Pacific Northwest wild-fire summer evening, Emmett and I drive the babysitter while the edges of the world burn. She’s chatty and optimistic about fall classes, but I’m distracted by the sun, which is Crayola-Orange, perfect circle, unnatural and eerie. The sky is a muted monotony of ash, like gray-brown construction paper. She prattles away, while I think about being trapped in a naughty child’s apocalyptic crayon drawing.

Addis Ababa Beté

March 15, 2023 Dispatches

By ABIGAIL MENGESHA

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Steel kicks in this belly.

Girls with threadbare braids
weave between motor beasts and cement bags.

Tin roofs give way to glass columns.
Stretching as if to pet the clouds.

Excerpt from Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey Across the Urban World

February 17, 2023 Essays, Nonfiction

By MARK VANHOENACKER

This piece is excerpted from Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.

Autumn 1987

I’m thirteen. It’s after school. I’m in my room, at my desk. I look out of the window over the drive and towards the garage. It’s late autumn and it’s almost dark outside. There’s frost in the corners of the window and snow is falling.

I look across the room, at the light-up globe on my dresser. I go to it, flip the switch on its cord and watch as the darkened sphere turns blue in the failing light and starts to shine as if it were in space.

I return to my desk. I sit down, pick up my pencil with my left hand and rest its tip on the sheet of graph paper. I love airplanes and cities and so, not for the first time, I’ve drawn a simple map of the world. I’ll draw a line that begins in one city and ends in another. But which city to start from?

Finding One’s Way Through Bewilderment: Virginia Konchan interviews Nathan McClain

January 16, 2023 Interviews

In this interview, VIRGINIA KONCHAN talks with NATHAN McCLAIN about his second full-length collection, Previously Owned. Touching on process and craft, literary influence, racial justice, and faith, this rich conversation celebrates the range of McClain’s poetry and the sense of history and place in his work.

January 2023 Poetry Feature

January 13, 2023 Poetry

New poems by our contributors TINA CANE, MYRONN HARDY, and MARC VINCENZ

Table of Contents:

            Tina Cane
                        —You Are Now Interacting as Yourself
                        —The Subject Line

Myronn Hardy
—Among Asters

Marc Vincenz
—An Empire in the Ground

You Are Now Interacting As Yourself
By TINA CANE

Sheila had IHOP     delivered to her apartment     in El Alto, NY
on January 6th     so she could kick back     self-proclaimed terrorist
that she is     and eat pancakes     while watching white supremacists
storm the Capital on T.V.     a coup

Crawl Space

January 12, 2023 Essays

By MELANIE S. SMITH

I.

The basement crawl space is tinged with dread. And a little bit of pride too. Because both my late husband John and my father—and even the firefighter I had to call when it flooded—hated the idea of having to go in. The dimly lit space is only eighteen inches high, a tight spot for a grown man, and full of spider webs. The floor is dirt; overhead is crumbled fiberglass insulation. You climb a ladder and go through a small rough hole in the house’s fieldstone foundation, then crawl about seven feet to reach the valve that supplies water to the outside faucet. This needs to be turned on in spring and off in late fall so the pipes don’t freeze and burst. To get out, you have to crawl backwards and reach a foot through the rough hole, searching blindly for the top step of the ladder. That last six inches is hell on the knees, all sharp rock and crumbling mortar.

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