Sophie Durbin

Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By Li Zhuang, Cynthia Chen, Chen Du, Xisheng Chen, and Jolie Zhilei Zhou

Table of Contents:

  • Li Zhuang, “Fan Fiction”
  • Cynthia Chen, “When the TOEFL robot asked us to ‘Describe the city you live in,’ the whole room started repeating that question as if casting an aimless spell”
  • Yan An, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, “Photo of Free Life in the E-Era”
  • Jolie Zhilei Zhou, “Der Knall” 
Portfolio from China: Poetry Feature I
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It’s a Gift to Be Alive: Jennifer Acker interviews Hannah Gersen

Hannah Gersen and Jennifer Acker

 

HANNAH GERSEN is a novelist whose fiction ranges from the strictly realist to the gently speculative. Her first novel, Home Field, is a deeply felt story about family and grief in rural Maryland, described as Friday Night Lights meets My So-Called Life. Her second, most recent novel, We Were Pretending, leaps into today’s most pressing crises–climate change, the creep of technology–through the lens of Leigh Bowers, an at-sea single mom trying to secure a better future for her daughter and a better death for her mother, who is dying of cancer. It’s beautifully written, imaginative, and elegiac with surprising twists and turns.

It’s a Gift to Be Alive: Jennifer Acker interviews Hannah Gersen
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Human Trees Are Not Moved by Wind

By ADAM YOUSSOUF
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

 

The Mango Garden

Birds of prey circled in the distant sky, watching the Earth’s surface: nothing, just warm air and a hot sun that spilled its rays angrily, recklessly. Sando jumped over a stream of dirty water and walked briskly down the road until he saw a group of young boys squatting on the road, defecating on piles of filth. He paid them no heed and continued a bit farther, where he saw another group playing football, bathed in thick dust, creating a commotion as they ran after their small ball. They yelled excitedly, calling each other after famous footballers, bellowing frenzied orders and laughing. One boy whimpered over his scraped knees, and others stood outside the circle, cheering and whispering.

Human Trees Are Not Moved by Wind
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Patron Saints

By KEVIN DEAN

Part One

It was winter by the time Mina and I met. I was on my usual afternoon stroll in Garden City when I saw him coming toward me by the United States embassy. He went slowly along the compound’s perimeter wall, his hands in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. I’d just purchased some oranges from a fruit seller on the street, and I took one and began to peel it. Mina didn’t look happy, and I was unsure if I should say hello to him or not.

Patron Saints
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At Basilica Notre-Dame

By MICHELLE LEWIS

 

To say you cannot stand inside the sky and still see its blue
is a way of understanding longing. But here in Penne-d’Agenais,
my favorite lesson doesn’t hold: step over the threshold and
you are all in, Hail Queen in Latin exclaiming from its underside
above a carousel of vibrant glass. It isn’t ancient, but it is pleasing
for a Sunday. Nor is it really a basilica—just a church no one troubles
to diminish. Our guide jabs his thumb at the confessional smiling, and
I mime looking at my wrist, mouth, How much time do they have?
Nothing is very beautiful. They say it’s where a shepherd sheltering
in the ruins prayed for a goat and one appeared. Our pilgrimage is
for foie gras and wine. All day I think of how last week when I left
someone, I turned and they were still there waving. Of Plath writing,
The train leaves a line of breath. In truth, I’m desperate for a world I can
touch: limestone dissolving along the cave’s joints, parched earth that
extends the salvia’s roots. Not even we would exist without constraints.
The last time we saw each other, we had sex in the extra room then
made the bed to look untouched. You smoothed your hand over it like a
benediction. I crossed into the open air, your eyes flints of mica through
the glass. The far / Fields melt my heart. I would have left my whole body
there. Would scatter what was left over the plush acres of tobacco in
the Lot-et-Garonne, over the cherry trees hung low with fruit, to know
how it would feel to love this wildly, without purpose, and be forgiven.

 

[Purchase Issue 27 here.] 

 

Michelle Lewis is the author of Animul/Flame and the forthcoming Spare. Her poetry has appeared in places like Bennington Review, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Hunger Mountain, and Denver Quarterly.

At Basilica Notre-Dame
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April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses

By ALAN BAER, CARLIE HOFFMAN, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, and FARAH PETERSON.

Table of Contents:

  • Campbell McGrath, “Hendrixiana”
  • Carlie Hoffman, “A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ” and “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen County Community College”
  • Farah Peterson, “Daedalus in Exile” and “Pasiphaë’s Grief”
  • Alan Baer, “Orpheus”

 

April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses
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A Good Girl in the People’s Republic

By LEI HU

A Good Girl

When she stepped outside and closed the door, the iron handle was so cold, it felt like it was burning. With the basket on her arm, Fu Rong slipped her hands into a pair of cotton mittens her mother had made. She knew she would warm up once she started walking. The stone lane in the village was slippery with ice; someone must have spilled water carrying it from the village well to their house. She slowed down and kept her pace steady, leaving the village behind her.

A Good Girl in the People’s Republic
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