Grand Bay, Alabama
Sam’s Super Burger
March 17, 2021
Dispatches
Dispatches
Ephemeral Address
March 3, 2021
Dispatches
Tonapah Desert, Arizona
At night from this distance, the twin rivers of car lights, red and white, barely seem to move along the I-10, even though I know from experience they’re traveling upwards of 80 mph. Most people see this stretch of empty desert between Phoenix and the California border as nothing worth slowing down to consider—the different personalities of the Saguaro, some with broken limbs or holes made by woodpeckers, or the colored bands of rock created by volcanic uplift or erosion from some previous era when there was measurable rainfall here — it all looks the same from blurred car windows.
The Language of the Body
February 17, 2021
Dispatches
By SARA ELKAMEL
Tents in a Bedouin-style camp at the Wadi Rum desert in southern Jordan. Courtesy: Soraya Ghezelbash.
Wadi Rum, Jordan
for Yvonne
We pull the black of Rum over our eyes
like skin. God’s earth is vast, vast, vast—but by day
she wrapped her limbs around my limbs and drew
my air. I follow her into the dark, consider saying: Please,
I don’t know what you need—but all I see is red.
At the foot of the dunes I push her, soft as the sin
that tips the scale. I run away like a ghost, a demon, a silent drum
in the faultless dark. Not a quiver of light around my bones.
E.A. Robinson Leaves by Rail
February 3, 2021
Dispatches
By ABBIE KIEFER
Gardiner, Maine
Raw granite and brick, hip roof like a helmet. At its height, it hummed: seventeen trains daily, lumbering in along the river. I imagine E.A. here with his ticket and his trunk. With his back to the brick, listening for a whistle.
Now the depot is a cannabis dispensary. They keep records in the ticket booth, make brownies in the basement. Preservationists call this adaptive reuse.
Postcard from Rhodes
January 19, 2021
Dispatches
Rhodes, Greece
At the Mandraki I saw three medieval windmills standing on the pier like heavy friars with their brownish cloaks, also the statues of two Rhodian fallow deer, a buck and a doe, symbols of the island. A theory persists that Crusaders brought deer to the island because their antlers secrete an alkali substance that repels snakes. Standing at the marina I gazed at the platoni, which are smaller than other types of deer, reaching only one meter in height. Their brown coats acquire white mottles in summer, while in winter they darken. Rhodes’s ancient name was Ophiusa, which in old Greek means a place filled with snakes. “That’s why you see cats everywhere,” one of the islanders told me. “They are the guardians of the island. They kill the snakes.”
Cihu
January 6, 2021
Dispatches
In the Garden of Invasive Species, I Offer Gratitude
December 22, 2020
Dispatches, Poetry
Port Murray, New Jersey and Milwaukie, Oregon
for my grandparents, who did not teach me
how to farm, and yet they scattered these seeds:
How a dunk into scalding water slips
the skin from a peach, leaves it unfuzzed, slick
for canning. How the trick to shucking corn
is one clean jerk. How jars of beet brine turn
eggs to amethysts that stain my fingers,
my lips. They left me to play in cellars
stocked with preserves and jam, in rows of trees
that released chestnut burrs for my bare feet
to find. What would they think of my pea shoots
left unlatticed, free to tendril one noose
after another around other plants,
my slapdash harvest, larder left to chance?
Providence
December 9, 2020
Dispatches
July on South St. (AEAE)
November 18, 2020
Dispatches
By NICK MAIONE
Northampton, MA
I open the doors and windows and shut off the lights.
For a while I play tunes on the fiddle
shirtless in my dark house. I love doing this.
For the first time all day I am not at home.
For the first time since the last time
my body is the same size as my flesh.
The only home I have is finally mine
and there is a breeze.
On Halloween
November 4, 2020
Dispatches, Translation
Translated by the author and JESSICA ZYCHOWICZ
Hudson, NY
I feel greedy, I have a frog in my throat because of this
expensive beer. I start to ask around, like a detective,
and immediately get some info
from the writer sitting at our table nearby,
whom I got to know just now.
The house of Ashbery has likely mahogany doors facing
the square, probably where city hall is.
I don’t even think about visiting without letting
someone know first. I stop and read a few poems in a bookshop.
You won’t repeat the jokes, I say,
you’ll go around to all the apartments on Halloween
with pumpkins, like I used to do
in my childhood, but then the main thing was trick or treat,
not to force someone for an interview or a photograph.
