A special portfolio of writing from the Lusosphere: Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora, with works in English and in translation exploring Lisbon, Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. A debut short story by Silvia Spring, essays on home and complicity, and the DISQUIET Prize-winning poem.
- DELAINA THOMAS I walk to the park / drummers sit in a circle under a white tent / they have drifted this far way on pacific waves / long feathers tucked behind their ears / they sweat in soft fringed hides / their faces lean and dark / I walk past a stall of frybread...
- RUI CARDOSO MARTINS There are two twin girls in the courtroom. They look very much alike, with fine blonde hair, tightly bound, and short, pretty noses. One can see they have not yet reached the point in life where twins become separate.
- ADRIENNE SU When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center, / the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown. / Jews had been in Henan so close to forever, / they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had found / an exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases. / Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.
- FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack / as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks, // not black rock or islands of fog rising individual / in a barrenness of salt. It is not that // it was not beautiful, but that I tried to conjure / its momentous light, eternal // that is inside the…
- ELIANE MARQUES We are full of bullets from AKs in our heads and in our necks / With stray slugs that enter our bones our backs / We are in the Ecstasy neighborhood / But not dying of love. // Starting yesterday / If anyone wants to kill me with love that raises the voice at my side...
- BRUCE BOND When the smoke cleared and took with it the sirens / and the uniforms strung across our sofas, / what remained were rivers, mist, whisper as a habit, / red dawn in the eyes of the sleep-deprived. / In the brush, here and there, beside the highway, / the revenant scent of metal and decay.
- JOÃO LUÍS BARRETO GUIMARÃES For a minute they believe in / the art of a fresh start / in a country where the ministry ceases to inaugurate / the ruins of / our dreams. Far away / a common lymph runs in Europe’s rivers / (like a crack in a wall hesitating in advance...)
- DEBORAH LINDSAY WILLIAMS “We need to do more, Mom,” my son tells me. He’s fifteen, supports the Kurdish resistance and fancies himself an anarcho-socialist (“It’s not like being an anarchist, Mom, okay?”).
- JOSÉ PINTO DE SÁ Papá announced, “Maria, I’m going to war,” and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. Mamã, clearing the table, gave her usual start. She stood stranded in the kitchen doorway, a dirty plate in each hand. Going to war meant going out in the dead of night to David’s bar...
- KANYA KANCHANA Give me / a circle, a halo, a circumscription, / a sphere of eleven dimensions, / a list of lists, a key. / Give me / a thunderstorm poncho, / an endangered turtleshell, / a backpack no heavier than 12 kilos, / a cave. / Give me a terrace of food, / a garden of songs, / a communal lovebowl, / a lab.
- KC TROMMER Inside the bounded mercury, / we keep going. All circuits that close / make serpents of us, constrict / and envelop every tender corner until / only a small portion / is distinct, our feet dangling like the end of a / sentence. We suspend ourselves / in a room full of light but take none in.
- EDGAR GARBELOTTO Fighting against the slowdown of the pills, C sits in front of the dressing table and hates what she sees: an ancient face with new furrows, an aged reflection of whom she thought she still was, a worsened version of herself.
- LANDA WO Little Cabindan history / All the Cabindan strategies were there / To mount the portrait of a free Cabinda. / The historic chief discoursed on education / The Cabindan earth sketched a faint smile. / The old lion of the FLEC / Brought the discussion round to multi-partyism
- LATOYA FAULK What of those like Grandma who refused continual abuse and letdowns? There is so little talk of Black women who age and come to find endless love in the companionship of their children. These are women like Grandma who find peace in homeplace without husbands and have few regrets for leaving...
- RODNEY A. BROWN 35 Enter inhale. Enter time. Enter inheritance. / Enter or else. Enter doors with handles, / without handles, manually manipulated. Enter alone / feelings. Enter tension. Struggle entering / bitterness enter. Love turning towards lust enter. / Historic languages enter.
- TEOLINDA GERSÃO The reason I first donated sperm wasn’t to fill the world with my children, but to get money to buy a new skateboard and go to the movies more often. I didn’t think it would change me. I was a young man then. It was an act as simple and banal, I thought, as donating blood or bone…
- JOAQUIM ARENA But it was no less true that Cape Verdeans in the U.S.—be they white, mixed-race, or Black—went to great pains to distinguish themselves from American Blacks. All Cape Verdeans, a mixed-race island people, feared being “mistaken” for ordinary Blacks…
- CLARA OBLIGADO She didn’t pick me up at the airport, and later stopped having me over because she considered me dangerous. I decided it wasn’t worth maintaining a relationship with someone who only worried about her own safety, even when she was thousands of miles from danger.
- LEONARDO TONUS they say that the most impressive of all crossings / is not thirst / or the fear / afterwards. / The humiliation / no longer wounds / what does not exist / they say / bodies in a boat / of bodies / veins / eyes / skin / penis / nails / vagina / cries // they say that the most terrible of all…
- BRUCE SNIDER Looking out at the blue sky / we listen to news / of men in Chechnya. Touching / counters, our washrags move like ghosts. / You sweep the kitchen. I tend the cry / of the washing machine, the low roof / that is our only roof. / We’ve never seen the sky / in Chechnya…
- SHAUNA BARBOSA The wolf belongs to the boy I to the wolf / I ask permission to still be myself this time of night. / Sem barriga, sem fome, sem bebida. Blue notes / from a dead man’s tribute creep up my balcony. / Damn, you know how you know a song, / but don’t know a song?
- STEVEN LEYVA Given this ruddy, straightened wig no one could place / my face on a spectral scale of “ethnic.” I slid / on and off stage. I spoke plain. I didn’t name names. Some / audiences mistook me for Muscogee Creek. I spoke / in first person. Under that wig I wore cornrows / in Oklahoma’s emaciated winter.
- RICHARD ZENITH For Pessoa it would prove to be an annus mirabilis, but the early months of 1914 already portended catastrophe for Portugal and the rest of Europe. Lisboners were not especially fazed by the train strike in January...
- ANANDA LIMA I close my right eye meu olho direito / and see everything tudo que / my mother my father meus pais no meu país / didn’t / know não sabiam / to do tudo / then que fazer? / e hoje, minha vista cansada / not a matter of laziness / the doctor says / it’s more mais mas / of a suppression
- JOSÉ LUÍS PEIXOTO Alone, I arrive in a looted city / and walk slowly, my arms hanging / loosely, I look through open doors, / what remains is scattered in the streets, / the air is clean because no one is breathing / it, this city, this silence, this city...
- KATHERINE VAZ I have yet to meet anyone who understands so well as my father how affection longs to travel far into a silence so deep it hums. And I would close my eyes when the foghorns blew, adding to my sense that real joy sounds like mournfulness, which he would explain...
- JENNIFER ACKER In 1969, my grandfather gave the keynote address to the Master Brewers Association of America. He was not a brewer himself, but he had worked thirty years as a consultant to the industry, and by this time he had provided advice to breweries in every state of America and seventy countries.
- MATILDE CAMPILHO On the night Billy Ray was born / (New York, 28th and 7th) / not one soul contemplated the geraniums / There was, however, the sound of the world falling / like multiple stalactites / in the area surrounding the hospital / Cars, some at 60 mph, others at 25 / Firefighters rushing to save a dog...
- PETER COOLEY So much for the wound in me / seeking a piebald answer / in the tulip’s streak cataracted by first frost, / the blue jay flapping across the grass, / one-winged, his flying / this crawl through blades he hues, / tenor and vehicle this bird and me, / both of us trying to accept / such ritual…
- FÁTIMA POLICARPO I opened my eyes to darkness and knew I was not alone. She stood in the far corner by the closet, waiting for something. The air between us, a conduit—even from across the room, I felt her body tingling my skin. You don’t always have to see a thing to know it exists.
- ROBERT CORDING The royal palms bathe in the soft warm air /of February and everywhere I look there is the play / of glittering afternoon light—on store windows / and metal bistro tables, on the well-polished / always white Mercedes and Lexuses, on the sorbet / pinks and oranges...
- JARID ARRAES tell me / about how tough everything is / and even the beer’s out of reach / and even writing has dried up / tell me / about sudden setbacks / and tight turns / about abandoned / books / exhibitions empty / of meaning / talk to me / about the smothering / routine / with the same words...
- HÉLIO PÓLVORA The man gazes at the slope climbing to Olivença square. He doesn’t need to go up there to know that the small, circular plaza, carpeted with grass, has a large cross and a white church—and that from there, as far as the eye can see, the coast, bordered with coconut palms, lies shimmering in the distance.
- SUSANA MOREIRA MARQUES 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. We talk over the phone; this may never…
- CRISTINA CARLOS In the playground, I didn’t count / I didn’t figure in games, I didn’t exist / No matter how right I was in the classroom
- PETER LABERGE Back in America, we’re still waiting for boys to die queerly. We’ve learned to expect it: the cops parked at the mailbox & ringing the doorbell, a mother afraid to answer, burying her scream in an apron in a moonlit kitchen. In Berlin, in the translation of afternoon...
- 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; / and how would it feel, as cotton as snow, / … should I reach out, / cup his skull as he once must have mine…
- JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER 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.
- SILVIA SPRING 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.
- 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, with its numbered cork trees, their skinned underbellies...
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Contents
The Common Statement by Jennifer Acker
Portfolio: Writing from the Lusosphere
Fiction from the Lusosphere
“The Treasure Hunt of August Dias” by Katherine Vaz
“Maria, I’m going to War” by José Pinto de Sá (Translated by Jethro Soutar)
“A Fourteen-Hour Lesson in Theosophy” by Edgar Garbelotto
“Sea of Azov” by Hélio Pólvora (Translated by Amanda Sarasien)
“Vigilância” by Casey Walker
“The Donor” by Teolinda Gersão (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
Essays from the Lusosphere
“Nobody Goes to Mértola” by Oona Patrick
“Brief Exchanges” by Susana Moreira Marques (Translated by Julia Sanches)
“It’s Done” by Rui Cardoso Martins (Translated by Dean Thomas Ellis)
“Her Borders Become Her” by Fátima Policarpo
“Under Our Skin—A Journey” by Joaquim Arena (Translated by Jethro Soutar)
“The Year of the Birth of Alberto Caeiro” by Richard Zenith
Poetry from the Lusosphere
“Alone, I Arrive in a Looted City” by José Luís Peixoto (Translated by Hugo dos Santos)
“The Rower of the Maré” by Eliane Marques (Translated by Tiffany Higgins)
“Ascendant Scorpio” by Matilde Campilho (Translated by Hugo dos Santos)
“Another Education” by Cristina Carlos (Translated by Jethro Soutar)
“Amblyopia” by Ananda Lima
“and the amazed girls….” by Eleanor Stanford
“two chairs” by Jarid Arraes (Translated by Marguerite Itamar Harrison)
“Kikawa” by Landa wo
“The Streets are Effulgent” by João Luís Barreto Guimarães (Translated by Calvin Olsen)
“The Mermaids’ Cry” by Leonardo Tonus (Translated by Carolyne Wright)
“It’s Raining in L.A. What Else I’m Pose to Do” by Shauna Barbosa
Fiction
“Exile” by Clara Obligado (Translated by Rachel Ballenger)
“The Home Front” by Silvia Spring
Essays
“In Search of a Homeplace” by LaToya Faulk
“‘You Like to Have Some Cup of Tea?’ and Other Questions About Complicity and Place” by Deborah Lindsay Williams
Poetry
“Provincetown” by Francisco Márquez
“The Jews of Kaifeng” by Adrienne Su
“Berlin (Eulogy 1)” by Peter LaBerge
“Pow-Wow at Thomas Square” by Delaina Thomas
“Playing Proctor” by Steven Leyva
“Attraction” by Rose McLarney
“Gródek” by Bruce Bond
“Enter Different Electronics (II)” by Rodney A. Brown
“The Couple” by KC Trommer
“Sketchbook: Naples, Florida” by Robert Cording
“No Alphabet” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
“Song: Travels with the Littlest of Satans” by Peter Cooley
“The News” by Bruce Snider
“Reach” by Iain Twiddy
“Building” by Kanya Kanchana
Accompanying Online-Only Writing from the Lusosphere
Poetry
Brazilian Poets in Translation (“A body on the sand” by Leonardo Tonus, translated by Carolyne Wright, and “Federal Intervention” by Eliane Marques, translated by Tiffany Higgins)
Lusa-American Poetry Feature (“Central Valley” by Carolyn Silveira, “Carlota Wears Her Sister’s Life Like Skin” by Nancy Viera Cuoto, and “California” by Jennifer Jean
Fiction
“A Cornstalk” by Rubem Braga, translated by Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren
Essays
“Blue Hydrangeas” by Esmeralda Cabral
“For Want Of” by Jeremy Klemin
“Islanders” by Scott Laughlin
Studio
“Ashanti/Disquiet” by Kanya Kanchana
Interviews
“Ask a Local with José Pinto de Sá: Maputo, Mozambique,” translated by Jethro Soutar
“Ask a Local with Joaquim Arena: Praia, Cape Verde Islands,” translated by Jethro Soutar
“Ask a Local with Landa wo: Strasbourg, France”
“Playing Frankenstein: an interview with Alison Entrekin” with Heath Wing
Dispatch
“Bread N’ Roses” by Erica Plouffe Lazure
