and the amazed girls saw their bodies equipped with golden plumage, and the wings and feet of birds
I turn over the soil, my son chattering beside me. He wants to talk about time, its intransigency and evasions. Our hands breaking up the clumps, pulling out old roots.
By OONA PATRICK
The Alentejo is the landscape of heartbreak. Or at least it was to me. Even its trees are clearly loners, set apart from each other at distant intervals across miles of sere brown fields. The Alentejo is all about waiting, from its numbered cork trees, with their skinned underbellies between harvest years, to the fabled, and perhaps fictional, nun Mariana, writing from Beja to a lover who will never come back. The Letters of a Portuguese Nun have been awaiting an author, an answer, for three and a half centuries now. Once celebrated for sparking a revolution in the European epistolary novel, now considered out of fashion even in Portugal, they remain a literary enigma, the country’s Mona Lisa.
As soon as I saw Katie, I wanted to live there. Concrete steps led up to the front door of the house, past a flower bush, fallen petals caught like fish in a net of branches. She opened the door and said, with her cartoon heigh-ho enthusiasm, “Well, you must be our Emily,” and led me in past the living room, down the stairs to meet James, her boyfriend. I had found the room through a handwritten ad tacked up in the University of London student union, and they had invited me over right away.
James was tall, long-limbed, with dark hair he had to brush away from his eyes before shaking my hand. Katie busied herself cleaning, washing a frying pan whose nonstick surface had burnt off the middle and then rinsing the plates under a swan-necked faucet. She used huge squeezes of soap for each piece and put the dishes onto the drying rack with suds still sliding off. A candle burned in a glass jar by the sink, sending out its perfume like a small, hot bouquet.
If not for the lust of women, there would be no alphabet.
Save for the breaking of traffic rules, there would be
no Cubism; no fractured light scrutinized from subways
or kaleidoscopes in the tool belts of surveyors.
By IAIN TWIDDY
As if he was pelting for a winter,
his hair returning, the closer he gets,
to that flossy, watchful, infant softness,
like the idea of an angel’s wing;
By CRISTINA CARLOS
Translated by JETHRO SOUTAR
At school I learned to count—one plus one is two
I learned to multiply—one times one is one
And subtract—one minus me is zero: Nothing!
Translated by JULIA SANCHES
1.
It begins with her saying I’ve never told anyone and ends with me saying Neither have I. And in between, a single sentence on how the love we feel for a child is not necessarily immediate, on how we need time to get to know and fall in love with another being, even though they were once inside us. We talk over the phone; this may never have happened face-to-face, or as we looked one another in the eye.
By HÉLIO PÓLVORA
Translated by AMANDA SARASIEN
The sea was unfurling bolts of cotton on the beach.
But now, at least in this cove, the sea is muddy. The waves sprawling on the sand, under the spotlight of an intense sun, exhibit a strange hue—a corrupt, corrosive red that might be called ocher, as if the sea, in its incessant flow, had passed through steep, muddy ravines before subsiding here, and dislodged clumps of earth that dissolved to contaminate green water, bluish water.
By JARID ARRAES
Translated by MARGUERITE ITAMAR HARRISON
tell me
about how tough everything is
and even the beer’s out of reach
and even writing has dried up
tell me
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