Why do you keep moving?
Because I’ve been given no other choice.
Why do you keep moving?
Because I don’t have the right passport.
With what do you cross borders?
A notebook, a hat, a picture of Jerusalem
and a poem in Aramaic.
We are driving through downtown Columbus, away from the Greyhound station. I spent fifteen hours on a bus traveling from New York City to visit for Christmas, a holiday, my mother reminds me, that is not even about Jesus anymore. This is a thought she has reiterated over the years, yet it never prevented her from partaking in the holiday during my lifetime. The absence of a decorative tree and gifts reflected a lack of money, not a rejection of the commodification of religion.
The first empty ring echoed all over the room. Since we had left the island, the phone-bridge had been an effective method to recover some of the sounds that, in their absence, made our exiled evenings emptier. But when they failed to answer, uncertainty and impotence took control. It was still early there. Only the low-pitch whistle of the still-weak wind caressing the tops of the palm trees, that ambiguous premonition that could sway either way. This time it would be real. But not yet.
By KRISTINA FAUST
Winner of the 2018 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.
The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.
By BEN SHATTUCK
I was seventeen when I met David, back in 1916. Now I don’t very much care to count my age. It’s April 1972 here in Cambridge. White puffballs that must be some sort of seedpod have been floating by the window above my writing desk for days, collecting on the sidewalk like first snow.
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER
The three of them play cards in the dining room. This is the story. Nothing else. Collectively, they’re almost three hundred years old. They drink juice and laugh. Now one of them turns on a small radio, which plays “Autumn Leaves.”
By JOHN MURILLO
Whitewalls Mudflaps
Late night howling down
a dark dirt road Headlights
killed and so the world gone
black but for the two blunts
lit illuminating Jojo’s fake gold
grin One girl each screaming
from the backseat we raced
the red moon rawdogged
the stars
We broke the law and into smiles.
We sowed dissent and daffodils.
We wiped our tears and private files.
We stacked the deck and dollar bills.
The rain had just finished saying, This block is mine.
The kind of rain where you could sleep through two breakthroughs and still have enough left to belly sing in the ambrosial hour.
Blood pellets in the dusk & dashes of hail were perfect for finding new stashes; that is to say, visitations were never announced.
A broken umbrella handle posed a question by the day care center.
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