By STELLA WONG
Spooks (Pidgin)
Iowa City
Re: M Moore
This is the mess.
This is the age we wrought.
Dispatches: Stella Wong
January 26, 2022
Dispatches
Dispatches
Quarters
January 12, 2022
Dispatches
By BEINA XU
Berlin, Germany
I live in the wrong colonial quarter of Berlin.
My neighborhood is called Afrikanisches Viertel, and my flat is on Guinea Street. There’s Kongostraße, Togostraße, Kamerunerstraße, Transvaalstraße, Sansibarstraße, Otawistraße—I could go on, but you could also just Google Germany’s colonial conquest of Africa.
R Is for Revival Field
December 29, 2021
Dispatches
St. Paul, Minnesota
R is for raw sewage, riverine wetland, rubbish, rookery of herons and egrets, rusting barrels of toxic waste. I try to imagine all of this at Pig’s Eye Lake. Surrounding it, marsh, cottonwoods, floodplain, bluffs above the great river. It’s a place the Dakota consider sacred, James Rock says. Čhokáŋ Taŋka, the Dakota call it: the big middle. I try to imagine the burial mounds that were blown up with dynamite, and railyards, locks and dams, dredging, and all the household trash that was dumped in the marsh, the industrial debris: lead-acid batteries, solvents, electrical transformers, burnt sludge. Eight million cubic yards, some of it fluorosurfectants—the so-called forever chemicals needed to make non-stick frying pans, stain-repellent for couches and rugs—the PFOS that have spread everywhere, now taint my blood, and yours, and every creature’s.
Magic Mile
December 15, 2021
Dispatches
Dispatch from New Hampshire Motor Speedway
The track is too slick, too cold. As the preacher intones Let us drive fast and cheer hard in Jesus’ name amen, the mist is already falling over us, the drivers, the life flight helicopter at rest on its helipad over the rise. Engines fire and the air goes thick with pressure. In minutes the leaders spin into the wall’s invisible give. Unlike Daytona or Talladega, where drivers shimmy from the windows of their wrecks, walking bruises at best—this is a minor crash. Its smolder mingles with exhaust, burning rubber, spent fireworks, cigarette smoke sent into the low cloudbank by a man ten paces past the No Smoking sign. This is New Hampshire: live free or die.
What the Midwest Was Like
November 17, 2021
Dispatches
Iowa City, Iowa
For months I cared for my plant: watered it, brought in light, cleaned its jar. I noted with pleasure when new leaves began to sprout. The capillary green that unfolded overnight. I watched its roots mingle and spread, tracing against the glass. Don’t forget to watch over the plant. But when I returned from four days away, half of the leaves had yellowed. One fell off at my touch. I watched as a fifth leaf began also to lose its pigment.
Two Poems by John Harlan Underhill
November 3, 2021
Dispatches
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Following his 60th class reunion at Amherst College in 2017, Harlan Underhill scripted a virtual diary in poetry, communicating over 200 entries to several fortunate classmates. The poems illuminate both immediate and past experiences and observations, memories both cherished and painful. These two poems are drawn from that collection.
Delete/Recover
October 20, 2021
Dispatches
By AKWE AMOSU
New York City
After Kenosha, Wisconsin, 26 August 2020
1. Erasure
I went to the for water,
although I had no thirst, again
unable to find Not sleeping,
roaming restless, hunting
at 2am for on my phone,
no rabbit hole too deep, however
dull, aching tired as though
I had been
Only three days into this,
asked how my was
going, I launched into a tense
that the question even
deserved and saw how hard,
again, I was trying not to the
plain fact that right in front of us,
again, the cop had emptied
his into a human,
now yet shackled
to his hospital bed. That again, a
young had taken down a human
with a military grade yet
away from the scene unhindered.
And that, again, we were being asked
to choke off thoughts, stifle
any sound, stave and belt
the chest to our agitation,
keep breathing because, again,
we
Plenty
October 6, 2021
Dispatches
Madrid, Spain
I chose my frutería not by its quality—how could I know that before I’d sampled its three types of peaches (red, yellow, squashed into donut-shapes), its abundance of tomatoes, its fuzzy orange nisperos?—but because of its old-fashioned tiled façade.
Untitled (Letter to Rügen)
September 22, 2021
Dispatches
Translated from the German by CRISTINA BURACK
Letter appears below in both English and German.
Rügen, Germany
Translator’s Note: I did not come across this text; rather, it came across me, arriving in my postbox in an orange envelope, complete with wax seal. It was part of a project called LitBrief-19, which was organized last spring by the Literaturhaus Bonn, in Germany, as a way to keep the literary community together despite the pandemic.
Every month, a writer pens an original letter that gets mailed out to subscribers. While I’ve enjoyed every letter, Gunther Geltinger’s text particularly moved me. It was both very specific to his beloved Rügen, a large German island in the Baltic Sea, and yet very universal in its emotions: how it expresses the unique personal relationship people can have with a place that plays an integral role in their identity, how the pandemic has upended our ability to be in such places, and how, despite a rapidly changing world environment, such places as experienced remain formative for life. It is an intimate text, and it’s packed with thoughtfulness, nostalgia, poetry, humor and a reassuring sense of being rooted in a place that is physical, geographical and above all else, emotional.
October XX, 2020
How should I start this letter? Using “Dear Sir,” “Dear Madam,” or “My sweet dear” to address you doesn’t do you justice. You’re not dear, and you’re hardly ever sweet. Your grammatical gender is neutral, but “the island,” die Insel, is feminine, and a friend of mine who recently visited me and expected a lighthouse surrounded by dunes, overlooking the sea in four directions, she even called you a continent. The fields of flint rock bordered by the moors struck her as being from another hemisphere; on the Zicker Mountains she felt as if she were in Scotland; and the Kreptitz Cliff, with its windblown hawthorn bushes and allure for amber seekers, reminded her of a secluded coast in New Zealand, where she’s never been. When I told her about an acquaintance who lives on the southern tip of the island and has never been to Gellort, the northernmost point, where my mobile service provider sends me a text message welcoming me to Sweden, she said: Well, it’s not like you would expect a Tunisian to have seen the Cape of Good Hope. My friend would probably understand why I am writing to you and would advise me to post the letter in a bottle. Someone on some other island, somewhere else in the world, would fish it out of the sea and think it was for them.
Bat Season in Austin
September 8, 2021
Dispatches
Austin, TX
The warm May evening fairly sizzled with bats. Out from under the crannies of Congress Avenue Bridge, Mexican free-tailed bats slipped out in threes, then tens, then hundreds, and flooded the Austin night, sipping from the skies tens of thousands of pounds of insects, as they did every spring and summer night. I felt at once the tickling of wings behind my ears and began shivering uncontrollably. No, fortunately not a bat—just the flick of a stranger’s ponytail at the back of my neck. But the shivery feeling remained; that contact with a stranger was a switch point in my mind. Any kind of creature, wonderful or mundane, slinked in the nooks and crannies of the city celebrated for its weirdness.
