- By YEHUDIT BEN-ZVI HELLER The puzzle of the sun’s longing for the sea The marvel: her love fills the sky overflows the rim till the sea is one with the sky The sun like Dido in flames melts into the water in a hiss that breaks waves into bubbles into shards which return with the waves Mirrors tremble with visions …
- By YEHUDIT BEN-ZVI HELLER I took three stones from there: one from the water one from the sun and a small one to grow. Co-translated by the poet and Stephen Clingman Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller is the author of Ha’isha Beme’il Sagol (The Woman in the Purple Coat), Kan Gam Bakayitz Hageshem Yored (Here, Even in the Summer It Rains),…
- By DON SHARE Hobo, Bono, boneheap. I mutilate dandelions in the sun, rattle my rake like a saber When Michelle-my-neighbor, over compost, opines that Aqualung’s a classic; “At least I think so. U2?” Does she mean: me, too? In the foul rag and compost pile Of my creaky abdomen I rustle all the leaves of my locomotive breath to agree…
- By DON SHARE I have a bone to pick with whoever runs this joint. I don’t much like being stuck out in the rain just to feed on the occasional vole or baby rabbit and these wet weed-salads confound my intestines. A cat can’t throw himself into the Des Plaines River, not even in…
- By DON SHARE Rabbit fur and hair strewn through the lawns of the Midwest! The famous feral parakeets of Chicago are chattering With cold. I want to drown myself out with the roar Of the greenish river that slices my city into two. Nothing pertains, if that’s the right word, to what I’m hearing: Little kids singing Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of…
- By CLIFF FORSHAW All day those stones have writhed with myth, roots have snaked necks, have had the cheek to prod gods and kings, crack armies, cities, ships; mocked Shiva, made him sprout arthritic wrists. Guides have strung us along all day through arches, dynasties, over long-fallen walls; bottlenecks where we’ve knotted up to squint, crouched, leaned back to squeeze the…
- When someone tells me a story, even a newspaper headline, I ask, “Where was that? Where did that happen?” From the context—the who, the where, and the when—I construct meaning. I believe I’m not alone. We have a fundamental desire to understand our environments, to understand how they affect who we are and what we care about. We live in…
- By CLIFF FORSHAW Tasmania: fragments from a story THE MAN The Governor built his prisons, but he built his chapels, too. Now the Lamb of God beams down in light that’s brightly stained, right foreleg implausibly curled around a regimental flag. Cloisters bristle with pennants, improbably unfurled, stiffened with gold, backbones of wire. Elsewhere, another chapel where Irishmen of much…
- By MARY JO SALTER I always seem to have tickets in the third or fourth balcony (a perch for irony; a circle of hell the Brits tend to call ‘The Gods’), and peer down from a tier of that empyrean at some tuxedoed insect scrabbling on a piano. Some nights there’s a concerto, and ranks of sound amass until it’s raining…
- By MICHAEL KELLY From the very dawn of the new technology, photographers sought to capture images of the heavens. In 1839 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre—inventor of the daguerreotype—attempted to shoot the moon, with little success. As photographic technology developed throughout the nineteenth century, it became an important tool in many branches of scientific inquiry. James Nasmyth’s book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet,…
- By SABINA MURRAY Once! This earth: a ball, a play-thing. The surface, in this Age—Exploration teetering into Reason—a driving spit of black ink dividing solid and liquid. This America, claimed by Spain, raided by England, inhabited by natives. This beast of Panama, neck stretched, holding to the southern continent by its teeth. These trees, a fleshy mass heaving with monkeys, weighed…
- By FIONA MAAZEL from Woke Up Lonely I had a career, I tanked it good. They’d sent me to middle of nowhere, Australia, which was, quite possibly, the most desolate place on earth. Eight hours a day listening to the North Koreans. Most tracking stations are remote for the obvious reasons of privacy and uncluttered air space, but what really matters…
- By MAURA CANDELA It was August when a young balding man and his fat mother appeared behind the counter of the corner deli. No grand opening. The previous owner, Herman, had cleared out one night. Gambling debts, neighbors said. Herman’s Deli had always been a beat-up place on the corner, and the new owners didn’t seem very ambitious either. The…
- By LAUREN GROFF My wife has always been a kind woman, but during the six months when I was in prison, her kindness grew to be a firm, beating thing. She called me every day and sent small and constant gifts. She brought our children to visit, and the kids soon lost their fury and held their smiles behind their palms,…
- By TED CONOVER If it weren’t for the detailed map in my hands—a page of the New Hampshire Atlas and Gazetteer, from DeLorme, with the small state divided up into more than thirty spreads—I’d have had no idea that a road existed here, half a mile from our house. And in fact, the atlas has oversold it: Brown Road does exist,…
- By BROOK WILENSKY-LANFORD In the beginning, the Lord God created man in Adams County, Ohio, just north of Peebles and south of Chillicothe. On the very western edge of the Appalachians, in the craggy countryside of southern Ohio, the three branches of a small river called Brush Creek converge in a valley lined with pitch pine and chestnut oak trees. A…
- By LUISA A. IGLORIA were men in wool or gabardine. They named the mountain road sinuous for its crawl-by-crawl among stone outcroppings. There used to be a waterfall called Bridal Veils. In legend, a woman falls to her death. (Why always on the eve of nuptials?) You’ll find strawflowers the locals call Everlasting, and spiny red blooms of bottlebrush but there…
- By JOHN MATTHIAS The old men who scrambled out at last from behind some rocks and trees below Poseidon’s great Horse Hill That they called kolonos hippios and was famous for the rider whose immortal name these coloni still bore and was Still guarded by Eumenides of black night and bright day Had a kind of tabloid curiosity and mean…
- By JOHN MATTHIAS i.m. Charles Olson and Thomas Wolfe so you’ve only a museum now and not a college at all although I understand the buildings still exist near the town where religion has reclaimed the real estate that John Rice took for the muses after he scandaled at Rollins lecturing on the classics in his jock. What . . .…
- By JOHN MATTHIAS O Lynx keep watch on my fire he had written in Pisa and Dryad he’d called her a long time back and she thought the new subtlety of eyes was probably hers dove sta memoria when she read it in his prison poems in her Künsnacht sanatorium . . . E.P. loves H.D.—it could have been encircled…
- By KEVIN O'CONNOR Driving from Dunmore East about halfway between Dublin and Cork on one of those narrow cattle roads, we thought we were again lost in the overcast and intermittent rain of a mid-summer Irish idyll when the sun suddenly appeared between clouds and down below the bay sparkled blue out to sea. And on the cliff…
- By CHRISTOPHER DEWEESE I walked out there between the boiling tides, where the sky turns into a horizon and the whales go global, swimming like happy boulders in an asynchronous landslide. The waves remembered themselves like oft-chanted prayers, carving soft insignias against the windward side of the land the land abandoned, the sheer, giant rocks that measured just how far…
- By CHRISTOPHER DEWEESE The water oh the sounds trapped between two bodies when the gulls break down into the waves and I’m on one shore and you are away. I raise my spyglass sort of like a cheer, drink you in my good eye until darkness comes, a backpack full of liquor. Driftwood forts turn the years inward like harmonicas…
- By RAFAEL CAMPO “A state of mind,” my grandfather would say, the sun as fierce as Mr. Cossimo’s critiques of everything, from his wife’s sauce to Senator Bill Bradley. Usually, we talked about his garden, where he grew tomatoes, Swiss chard, peppers, cucumbers, and white eggplant he said were better than the Cossimos’. “A state of mind, grandson.” He talked…
- By RAFAEL CAMPO The neon strokes of Chinese characters exclaimed the ancient city’s endlessness. Beijing at night: how much we cannot know, how little we will ever understand. For supper, jellyfish and giant clam, profundities we couldn’t contemplate; and afterwards, the acrobatic show in which a tiny woman log-rolled you (compliant “dear guest” from the audience) teeteringly in an enormous…
- By PHILIP NIKOLAYEV * Daily land for the craving landlubber givest us this day, art the way. Stars and Mars inconsolable shine, sway, entwine in the trite. Salvage cars, salvage cars in the night. Ignite. * They forgot on the café table sorely unattended behind the Bunn O Matic brewer embottlings of imperception lazily overcast and over the snow’s gorilla stretched…
- By MARINA TSVETAEVA 1. LAMENT Hippolytus! Hippolytus! It stings! It sears… my cheeks blaze… How pitiless the hell, Hippolytus, Concealed in your name! It’s like a long slow wave Slid along a granite seawall. I’m singed by Hippolytus! I rave and breathe Hippolytus! My arms want to ram the dirt! My teeth want to crush rocks!... Cry with me, and lie…
- By MARINA TSVETSAEVA Waterfalls of curtain like spray – Pine needles–flame–shimmer. The curtain has no secrets from the stage: You are the stage, I am the curtain. Behind painted vines (in the lofty Theater–amazement ran riot) I conceal the hero’s tragedy, The time of action–and–the seat. In waterfalls of rainbow, an avalanche Of laurels (he expected them! he knew!) I…
- By HONOR MOORE Of sheets and skin and fur of him, bed of ground and river, of land, or tongue, of arms, the wanton field, of flame and flowers, stalk of him, harp, arboreal, steep and rush. House him in the coil of my hair, silk of him and open sea, flood, star, toes of him, stickiness, of flesh. Rind…
- By YEHUDIT BEN-ZVI HELLER If I forget you Jerusalem, may my right hand wither away. . . If I do not remember you . . . —Psalms 137:5-6 To write in Jerusalem in a garden with a wind that comes from the mountain under a canopy of grapevines sun everywhere outside light and shade within and the sounds from the quarry…
- By YEHUDIT BEN-ZVI HELLER With burning eyes she rose before dusk the mountains beneath her and all the hills filling like window panes with liquid suns In this hour she lights her towers like candles or perhaps after blessing the fire she has raised her hands to cover her face with light Co-translated by the poet and Agha…
- By MARIA TERRONE One of several names given to a ghost island that appeared in July 1831 When the buried volcano erupted, sulfuric smoke leapt from the Sicilian sea, seeped through locked, felt-lined chests, blackening the silverware. It was like rage—flames and letting go, the sea a bubbling cauldron of dead fish, a bad…
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Contents
“The Common Statement: A Note from the Editor” by Jennifer Acker
Poetry
“Ferdinandea” by Maria Terrone
“The Saints of Streets” by Luisa A. Igloria
“Kolonos Hippios” by John Matthias
“Asheville Out” by John Matthias
“Modernato Pizzicato” by John Matthias
“Leaving Dunmore East” by Kevin O’Connor
“The Seastack” by Christopher DeWeese
“The Narrows” by Christopher DeWeese
“New Jersey, the Garden State” by Rafael Campo
“The Massage” by Rafael Campo
“Fleetings” by Philip Nikolayev
“Phaedra” by Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Catherine Ciepiela)
“The Curtain” by Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Catherine Ciepiela)
“Song” by Honor Moore
“Realization” by Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller (co-translated by Stephen Clingman and the poet)
“Jerusalem Light” by Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller (co-translated by Agha Shahid Ali and the poet)
“Sunset in Herring Cove” by Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller (co-translated by Agha Shahid Ali and the poet)
“Otter Cove” by Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller (co-translated by Stephen Clingman and the poet)
“The Crew Change” by Don Share
“Wishbone” by Don Share
“High Holidays” by Don Share
“Angkor” by Cliff Forshaw
“from Vandemonian” by Cliff Forshaw
“The Gods” by Mary Jo Salter
Images
“Moonscapes” curated by Michael Kelly
Fiction
“Full Circle Thrice” by Sabina Murray
“Interpreters of Men Get It On” by Fiona Maazel
“The Boys Club” by Maura Candela
“Exquisite Corpse” by Lauren Groff
Essays
“Brown Road (1853-1932)” by Ted Conover
“The Serpent Lesson: Adam and Eve at Home in Ohio” by Brook Wilensky-Lanford
