By TOM SLEIGH
At Show and Tell, in front of the whole class,
the cubs’ jaws yawned wider than the boa constrictor’s
that bolted down the lethargic, pink-eyed mouse—
how they’d nuzzle and lean into our stroking…
But when genetics took over, their cells didn’t care
if they grew up in someone’s basement or were teething
From The Long Gone Daddies
By DAVID WILLIAMS
The night doesn’t ask much, my daddy used to say, a whiff of gas and a working radio. Come dark, he said, you can pull in ancient sounds from hundreds of miles away – blue stomps from the big cities, lick-skillet country come down from the hills and up from the hollows, gospel on the lam from grace.
My daddy told me a good many things, for never being around much. He told me stories of the road and the songs he found there. Songs of sweet evil and blue ruckus. Murder ballads, odes to ghosts. Drinking hymns.
By CODY WALKER
You’re just a baby,
And as such, may be
Susceptible to lies
(And wonder, and surprise):
By JESSIE MARSHALL
The club’s house mother—we’ll call her Cheryl—didn’t think I dressed sexy enough. I had purchased three slinky outfits in Camden Market, two red and one black, for less than thirty quid each. They weren’t slutty exactly, but came off quickly and showed a lot of skin. Cheryl made her own dresses and sold them for ninety pounds, so I knew her opinion was not to be trusted.
By TOM SLEIGH
for Tayeb Salih and Binyavanga Wainana
Heat lightning flicking between head and heart
and throat makes me hesitate: I could see
in the rear view one part of the story
while up ahead the crowd breaking into riot
By TIMOTHY WATT
Long ago I found myself in a dark wood wandering, a tale-teller with no tale to tell. How I’d come to be in that place, I don’t know. I was there shivering, empty, trying and failing to remember the tales I’d told, in times past, in ages before. I couldn’t remember any of them, much as I tried to conjure characters in the throes of a verb, scenes in rooms, conversations, anecdotes, themes. And soon after—I don’t know when, time like the night was monochrome and either too rapid in its passing to be tracked at all, or statuesque, cold and still—I found I no longer knew what a tale itself was, its contours and constituent parts, its reasons, its design. It was then I heard a slow crashing in the timber behind me. I did not look up. There was nothing consoling to be seen. Before me stretched a vast lake, a lake whose color rendered all previous understandings of black, blue, a lake of terrifying calm. The surface was glass, unrippled and hulkingly silent, and the lake did not lap against any of its shores. It was—I see it now—a body of water in an attitude of petrifaction.
Translated by JACQUELYN POPE
In love everything is possible. You doggedly
paper a tree with roses
and say: this was the place
and everyone who passes should
Translated by PHILIP NIKOLAYEV
I wore the same checkered coat for six winters in a row. It had once been warm and even elegant in its way, but then developed holes and faded. Whether because the cotton lining had become matted or because the outer cloth had worn thin from wind and rain, the garment no longer gave any warmth. I felt cold even in reasonably warm weather. Wind would penetrate it in unpredictable spots, now chilling my waist, now freezing my shoulder blades, as if someone had thrown a piece of ice behind my collar. When one time I arrived at the Kolosovs all soaked and melancholy with hunger, Ivan hung my coat on the kitchen radiator and scratched the back of his head.
By JUAN RULFO
Translated by ILAN STAVANS and HAROLD AUGENBRAUM
I’m sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out. Last night, while we were having dinner, they started kicking up a huge ruckus and didn’t stop singing until dawn. That’s what my godmother says, too: that the frogs’ shouting scared her sleep away. And she’d like to sleep now. That’s why she told me to sit here, near the sewer, waiting with a board in my hand so that I can smash to smithereens any frog that hops out … Frogs are green all over, except for their bellies. Toads are black. My godmother’s eyes are black, too. Frogs are good to eat. You shouldn’t eat toads; but I’ve eaten them, too, though you’re not supposed to, and they taste the same as frogs.
By JACQUELYN POPE
Whatever possessed you
pursues me. Whatever
unnerved you sings me
to sleep, repeats and repeats,
insists. Whatever composed
you constricts me. Where
you were bright I was blind.
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