One morning we hike a few miles to a nomad’s camp on an isolated island off Turkey’s southern coast. The hike is uphill, hot, and arduous. We pass the ruins of a Roman cistern and a dry-land tortoise headed downhill. After an hour the path levels out into a broad valley and we arrive. Only the woman is home. Her name is Hanife.
Long Island City, Queens, New York, US
Even if the day was sunny, the air would seem to darken the longer we drove and the farther we bore into the industrial zone. The red brick factories built early in the 20th century were still holding on then, producing staples, electrical circuits, distributor caps and who knows what else. Yet I recall no workers on the streets. There were no stores, no streets, no sidewalks, just ruts. It’s as if the factories were run by ghosts and the only evidence of life was an occasional wisp of smoke rising into gray haze.
When I was a kid, some of the other ten year olds on the bus taught me how to blow spit bubbles. You catch a loop of air against your bottom lip on the tip of your tongue, then roll up your tongue to blow the bubble off into the air. We had great fun wafting these dime-sized spheres over the bus seats. The bus driver wasn’t so amused. She yelled at us, then reported us to the school for “spitting on the bus.” When I got home, my mother–who was still a stay-at-home mom then, though she started working not long after–gave me a good scolding.
By SUSAN HARLAN
CORSICANA BRICK CO. So say the bricks, cut within an inch of their lives, and the wet leaves like beetles’ wings, caught in the cobbles. We are the bricks’ leaves, they say, under my feet.
The color of the leaves is the color of the rusty railroad spikes that I gathered in the rain. Illegally, it would seem. Property of the train company, I’m told – possessed by others.
Outside the window I could hear men calling out to one another, stumbling up the street. Night, so! Safe home! Someone started singing. Then the baby stirred and the living room door clicked shut again. This time my husband heard it too. He got up, switched on the lights, checked that the apartment was locked (it was), and then turned off the lights and came back to bed. Soon he was fast asleep.
Tonight the boys swaying in the northbound train car
wear old-logo Bulls hats and France IV
stitched into their puffy jackets—
Underground, you expected a loamy smell. Instead you inhale a dry, metallic breeze. The English-speaking Polish guide tells your tour group that the mine’s temperature holds at 57ºF despite the 80º May day above in Krakow. You zip up your jacket before you descend the stairs cut out of salt.
By KELLI ALLEN
Some road trips are propelled by an arrow of indifference. We look for the keys on their ring, nestled often in a bag of felid mice. If my open sweater signifies carry, tail and tuft and brass also mean rest.
When we drove past the circus hand’s kitchen, open in way of Southern Indiana late summers, we smelled peaches burning on the rough iron stove. I remembered when you told me that every day is a sliding between an expectation and an opening. It was easy to hand-over every coin in my purse and burn both our tongues with pit fruits and cheap bourbon.
By MARTHA PARK
Deer Neighbor, hand-pulled linocut
When the radiators overheat we try to turn the knobs wearing oven mitts. At night it’s too hot to sleep, and we open the windows to the cold December air. My nose bleeds intermittently, suddenly, all winter long. I wake in the night to the hot rushing smell of iron, or, elbow-deep in dishwater suds, feel the blood coming too quick to stop.
There exists a certain splendor in the protestations of the electorate on the grounds of the Elected. Here, in the southern wing of the Nebraska State Capitol, roughly 75 farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, Native Americans and other dissidents have gathered to oppose construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and more specifically, the Governor’s authority to approve the pipeline’s path through Nebraska. They’ve come wearing belt buckles and Wrangler jeans, bolo ties and t-shirts that scream “Pipeline Fighter” and “#NOKXL.” But it’s difficult, in these marbled and dimly lit halls, not to feel awed by the stature of it all, the history cast in bronze and embossed beneath your feet. Even the atheist may be overcome by the grandeur of a cathedral.
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