Dispatches | Page 33

Dordrecht

April 17, 2013 Dispatches

By MARCEL PROUST

A baker in the square

Where nothing stirs but a pigeon

Lines Regarding the Black Feathers on Canton

April 10, 2013 Dispatches

By CURTIS BAUER

Grackles foraging outside of a Whataburger near North Lake Park.

Soon enough the grackles will truth

the yard out back beneath the wires,

the sidewalk cracks, the live oak roots.

They will lose their dying feathers, now glossed

Hyphen-Nation

April 3, 2013 Dispatches

By MARIE-HELENE BERTINO

I write to you from what splits my first name. The overpass between two nationalities. The sandbar between the shore and the winking sea. Marie and Helene walk down the street, holding hands. The hyphen contains both of the things it connects, but also a third thing that is neither Marie nor Helene.

Before the Storm

March 27, 2013 Dispatches

By GEOFF BENDECK

The police commander of Quinindé showed up dead in the province of Manabí yesterday, pounds of cocaine and money littering his car. He died, slumped over the steering wheel, his body blistered with bullets. There is the menace of drugs, poverty, and gangs that looms over this city where the two rivers meet. Lately, anonymous flyers have appeared threatening vigilante justice—threatening to take back the town. “We know who you are thieves, murders, gang members,” it says. “And we will bring you a taste of your own poison.”

Instead of Flowers

March 20, 2013 Dispatches

By MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI

Usually 4 p.m. glares on my windshield as I head to the Hollywood Hills Forest Lawn Memorial Park. I am 75 miles per hour on the 134, maybe more. Others fly by me, impatient. The temptation to catch up to them is strong, as always. But I stay below the eighties, as though the seventies are the right glide, on Lenny Kravitz tunes. At the exit, flower vendors on foot wave roses and chrysanthemums. Their nearest competition is the flower shop at the gate, less than a mile away. You’d think they’d sell for bargain. But I buy a bunch or two anyway. It beats walking to the shop, and ringing for someone to come out when you’re ready to pay.

Headstone Stories

March 13, 2013 Dispatches

By JAYNE MORGAN

I grew up in graveyards. We had one at the bottom of our farm drive and on weekdays I would walk through it to catch the bus to school and then back again on the way home. On Saturdays I would be sent on a mission to rake through the piles of recently discarded wreaths to retrieve the plastic ribbons. Anyone receiving a wrapped gift from our family could, if they looked carefully, have spotted the faint marks from the rusted wires and the creases from previously tied bows.

A Painter Brought to Life

March 6, 2013 Dispatches

By TODD PITOCK

In Telč, a town about two hours from Prague in the Czech Highlands, rain beat down like a parade of drums. Zdenka Noskova, the woman I had come to see, arrived at my hotel in the main square to take me to a memorial she had created.
At 37, Zdenka had a demure manner. She wore her auburn hair short, and dressed in a long skirt. She worked in a print shop, though the lasting imprint she’d made had been a walking trail, and later, a memorial she’d created to the memory of a Jewish painter who died in the Holocaust.

The Fiction and Nonfiction of the St. Petersburg Pier

March 1, 2013 Dispatches

By SCOTT GEIGER

The modern novel is probably an unintended consequence of nineteenth-century European cities. James Wood glosses the idea in his handbook How Fiction Works. The breakthrough narration in Madame Bovary, for instance, a stylish authorial voice that seemingly dissolves into the consciousness of its subjects on a wash of image and detail, corresponds to a boom in European industrial urbanism. Its vector is the flâneur: the young and loitering, the unemployable café-sitters, the arcade-browsers. These onlookers adapted their eyes to the city’s “large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail,” says Wood.

Alaska, Massachusetts

February 27, 2013 Dispatches

By NAILA MOREIRA

Beyond the bridge of Highway 91, beyond the levee and the last line of houses at the outskirts of town, civilization goes to rural scenes. First you pass a patch of low trees; then a small paddock and barn where two horses live; and then you come to the cornfields — wide, flat, golden and stubbly by the riparian woodland of the Connecticut River. I’ve always wanted to come to these fields to see the stars, but the landscape is lonely, and I would be afraid to come alone at night.