By TIMOTHY LIU
Her hands kept on
working their way
into my pants even
after the wedding
toast—the evening
merely an excuse
By ERICA DAWSON
I deserve a steed for this. This ride. The sex
that didn’t need bodies. No straining hip
craned nearly out its socket. Not one flex.
Seduction.
Translated by OSTAP KIN
—Tell me about your new girlfriend, about the one
you’re living with now. What’s between you two?
—The air is between us. I just live with her
the way small children live with their fear.
By SEAN BERNARD
Living with Ricky is fine. The things you accept—they’re small things. Like the way he kicks off his shoes in the hallway at the end of the workday, leaving them there for you to nearly break your ankle on when you have to pee in the middle of the night. He has a point: if you know you’re going to trip on them, why don’t you just move them? Or also how he’ll fall asleep after work on Fridays—you both get off at five, but he always gets home first and somehow has time to be on his third Corona when you walk into the apartment, and he’s sitting in the yellow beanbag chair, half-asleep with an Angels game on, remote tucked safely under his leg. He’s happy to wake up early Saturday morning after you’ve talked the night before about sleeping in together, the weekend being the only real chance you get to wake up with him slowly, to lie in bed in that half-drowsing state that’s exactly how you’d spend your whole life if only someone would, you know, create a job for that, a job where pajamas were the uniform, a bed the office, and being snoozy and not really worrying about the clanging outside world was the main task at hand—those mornings, while you’re drooling into your pillow, Ricky will yank on his sponsor-laden clothes and go bicycling. Leaving you to wake up alone. Which isn’t so bad, but then he’ll call around noon asking you to pick him up at the local craft brewery as he’s had too many to bike home. That’s responsible, though. Calling you.
By ERICA DAWSON
The counselors told us to fucking go
to bed; but, earlier they’d taught us one
more Christian song—
It only takes a spark
to get a fire going—
By W. RALPH EUBANKS
All thinking Southerners, at some point, find their minds at war with their hearts, a battle that often ends with the heart claiming victory. It is this triumph of the heart that landed me, a black expatriate Mississippian, back in my home state again. Yet returning to Mississippi after nearly forty years, albeit temporarily, as a visiting professor, has left me torn somewhere between acceptance and separateness. In some ways, the longer I am in the South, the less I try to maintain my distance from the place.
Translated by OSTAP KIN
A good day is a day
without bad news.
Sometimes everything turns out fine—
no news,
no fiction.
Three thousand steps to the supermarket
frozen chickens
like dead stars
gleam after death.
All you need is
mineral water,
I only
need my mineral water.
Execs, like
frozen chickens,
are hatching
the eggs
of profit
in the twilight.
Three thousand steps back.
All I need to do is hold on
to my mineral water,
to hold on to
the countdown:
thirty-two days without alcohol
thirty-three days without alcohol
thirty-four days without alcohol.
Birds perch on each of my shoulders,
and the one on the left keeps repeating:
thirty-two days without alcohol
thirty-three days without alcohol
thirty-four days without alcohol.
And the one on the right responds:
twenty-eight days till a bender
twenty-seven days till a bender
twenty-six days till a bender.
And the one on the left is drinking the blood of Christ
from a silver chalice.
And the one on the right—the simpler one—
is drinking some crap,
some diet coke.
On top of that
they’re both drinking
on my tab.
Serhiy Zhadan, Ukrainian poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator, was born in the Luhansk region in 1974 and has published over a dozen books. In 2014 he received the Ukrainian BBC’s Book of the Decade Award; he won the Ukrainian BBC’s Book of the Year Award in 2006 and in 2010. He’s the recipient of the Hubert Burda Prize for Young Poets (Austria, 2006) and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature (Switzerland, 2014).
Ostap Kin has published work in St. Petersburg Review and Krytyka Magazine. He lives in New York City.
By PETER SCHMITT
It was a little blue purse she had asked for,
my mother, age four, when her father called
from the Mayo Clinic. With a silver chain—
and he had somehow found one in a pawnshop
Giyorgis Balthus: 1321-1400
1.
We surged in the moon-darkened
room, between counter-actions,
naked, our spectres clocking
the grey-scale before morning,
By ELVIS BEGO
The first time I came upon Raley was in a volume of Edith Wharton’s correspondence—a short, scabrous note he wrote from Venice in the winter of 1908. When I later read his Drowned City—one of those belated NYRB Classics that seem to appear out of a hidden crack in the library of Babel—I found its rooftop phantasmagoria irresistible. Tales of an unnamed city’s last population of gnarled maniacs, scheming widows, foolish valentines, old men whose eyes are black with mascara, boatmen mooring their vessels to weathervanes, women who sell their kisses for a dry bed. The city is half-sunk in its dream and no news of the world across the spent sea. “An imagination as awkward and prophetic as Kafka’s,” says the blurb, predictably. Nobody knew about the book for a hundred years. It was privately printed in Venice in 1899—only a trunkful of copies—and remained obscure till Edward Kingsley, the Anglo-Italian philanthropist-slash-Luddite, found it in a library in Burano. James Wood’s piece in the New Republic, although not without censure (“Raley’s iambic murmur too often apes the Jacobeans … but the wry vision is his own. His world is peopled by blind self-unravelers, and we are their stunned eavesdroppers”), sent me to the bookshop, and I tore through the two hundred perfect pages in a sitting.
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