Buone Vacanze

Dispatches will be taking a vacation during the month of August. In the meantime, please take a virtual vacation with some of our recent dispatches: Join Julia Lichtblau as she contemplates economics in sun-soaked Lisbon; Maura Candela as she stumbles upon her husband’s roots in Sicily; James Gill as he recalls a paradise lost in Canada’s Saskatchewan prairies, and Todd Pitock as he gazes up at the cold night sky in one of the hottest places on earth.

Or, peruse our archives where you can browse dispatches by location.

See you in September!

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Buone Vacanze

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I/Teh Ran

SARVIN PARVIZ
We were celebrating a friend’s birthday in our group chat, signing his birthday card, together apart, when Israel launched the strikes. Now we are on the call, and someone says she was making Adaspolo, preparing the lentils when she heard the strike. She could stop, she thought to herself, that she should.

A horseshoe crab on the sand

Cape May, midsummer

EVELYN MAGUIRE
I become a house lived-in. Living in my mother’s house, again, it’s easy to drift into the past. Blue bottle light, dust motes, a silver rattle. The sound of it: butterfly wings. I am tender towards everything. Everything is a child and I am everything’s mother.

The Ground That Walks

ALAA ALQAISI
We stepped out with our eyes uncovered. / Gaza kept looking through them— / green tanks asleep on roofs, a stubborn gull, / water heavy with scales at dawn. // Nothing in us chose the hinges to slacken. / The latch turned without our hands. / Papers practiced the border’s breath.