Dispatches | Page 28

Worth Seeing

March 27, 2014 Dispatches

The day after Thanksgiving, my parents and I drive from Laramie to Winter Park in a rental Buick. We go to see what we hear is worth seeing in Colorado, and we confuse it for all that there is.

We stop in Walden, just south of the Wyoming border and the Medicine Bow mountains. I wonder if the name has anything to do with Thoreau, or if names in the West aren’t after names in the East like names in the East are after places and people in England. I need a bathroom break and my father says it’d be nice to stretch his legs.

Memory of Cold and Wind

March 19, 2014 Dispatches

By ANNA HOGELAND

His friends ask us why we’d go to Liverpool. We don’t have an answer to give them and I forget the true one. We look at each other, shrug and say we’d heard it’s the most romantic city in the world.

A Month on the Edge of the Caspian Sea

March 12, 2014 Dispatches

By TIMOTHY KENNY

Baku is a city intent on reinventing itself block by steady block. Apartment high-rises and office buildings from the Soviet ‘70s — pock-marked and stained gray by pollution — are transformed in white stone at a frightening pace. Baku today reminds me more of Vienna or Zagreb than a former Soviet republic that clings to the edge of the Caspian Sea.

Winterhospital

March 5, 2014 Dispatches

By DAWN TEFFT

the window is freezing into a lake

and nothing on its surface has vertebrae

Acting

February 26, 2014 Dispatches

By MARGOT SCHLIPP

The crowds are a loaded pincushion
that pricks me as I lean into
the human tide. The rotunda’s marble

2 Poems

February 19, 2014 Dispatches

By MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI

Towards Algiers

The desert scatters

on our feet. It’s the only

surrender that counts,

vast, unobstructed.

Málaga

February 12, 2014 Dispatches, Translation

By JUAN ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ IGLESIAS

Translated by CURTIS BAUER

Todas y cada una de las cosas

del mundo tienen hoy exactitud

matinal. Esta dulce luz de Málaga

declara una vez más la equivalencia

entre la realidad y el paraíso.

Destinados al Olvido? (Destined for Oblivion?)

February 5, 2014 Dispatches, Translation

By JUAN ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ IGLESIA

Translated by CURTIS BAUER

Álvaro Mutis habla lentamente.

Una entrevista en un canal hispano.

Me interesa el desgaste de las cosas.

Mezzogiorno

January 29, 2014 Dispatches

By ELLIOT SILBERBERG

There was a pile of old vines and twigs in the vineyard. We lit a bonfire and the flames licked daylight into the night sky. Next morning there was a gray and black patch of coldashes, perfectly round. It looked hard, like crushed marbles, so I stepped on it. My boot sank deep into tiny feathers. A gray boot and a brow none told me I should have known better.

Tour Guide

January 22, 2014 Dispatches

By NINA PURO

Details Concerning the Individual Denizens and Their Residences

In New Mexico, days end with soaking the frijoles for tomorrow. They start with a lump of bacon grease sizzling in a cast-iron pan, with chipping a chunk of green chilé from one of the blocks in the freezer. People like food that hurts them as they eat it. Even the cocoa has chilé in it and a Spanish name and must be beaten to a froth.