I arrived by evening train from Kyiv, the trees along the tracks slicing through orange light outside my window, an erratic metronome whose meter would set the pace for my three years as a Peace Corps ESL teacher in the village town of Radyvyliv. There would be long camp days with my students stretching into what would feel like weeks, winter flu quarantine days when I would stay indoors to write bad prose until I fell into a deep sleep as the early morning light broke, hours and hours of reading Gogol by candlelight and trying to conjure up some ghost of lunatic inspiration—but in those first few days of struggling to find a grip on the culture, in those first few hours with my host family, everything arrived and departed at a rapid pace. I knew just enough Ukrainian to know how much more I needed to learn, and how little time I had to learn it before I would begin to look like an idiot. Peace Corps had arranged for me to live with a host family for the first month of my stay before moving to an apartment, and I was terrified of insulting these people with my ignorance of all things Ukrainian.
Dispatches
Worth Seeing
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
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
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
Acting
The crowds are a loaded pincushion
that pricks me as I lean into
the human tide. The rotunda’s marble
2 Poems
Towards Algiers
The desert scatters
on our feet. It’s the only
surrender that counts,
vast, unobstructed.
Málaga
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?)
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
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.