from Invisible Earthquake
1st May, 12h38
I’m navigating in and out
Of mental combat
Trying to figure
Exactly what station I’ve pulled into,
How to answer that simple question
How are you?
By ALAN FINLAY
It’s our wedding anniversary—i almost forgot.
been drowning listening to bartók,
and when i say
drowning i mean—
you run bathwater
submerge yourself, exhausted
“ask daddy”
By LIESL JOBSON
Potato skins, not peach skin satin,
pills, not pearls for buttons at my wrists,
onions in my bouquet, for coming tears.
By LIESL JOBSON
On my side of the glass
POLICEMAN KILLS CAT
are burglar bars
on the other side
“DR DEATH” ACQUITTED
a grille
Selkirk had never owned a wristwatch. It had never seemed necessary to be in possession of one. What time it was had never been of any consequence to him in any part of his life. There was his childhood in Calcutta when time seemed lozenge-like, lickable—those long afternoons of lying still in shaded rooms, and then afternoon tea on the veranda with his mother, tapping out with her long nails the anguish of her most recent rebuff at one of the clubs on account of her lowly origins—and then, mercifully, his father, returning from a long day at work, the gentle grey-haired man who had rashly married this chorus girl in the throes of middle age, his father, still loyally serving the company he had joined as a young man in pre-Independence times and trying to make as good a life as possible for them all. When he unexpectedly keeled over, just a few months before he was due to retire, she did not hesitate to return to her old life, and Selkirk was promptly despatched to the boarding school that his father had attended, where time—to return to our original subject—was dispensed in quantities he could neither measure nor understand.
Poems by LORIS JACOPO BOLLINI and art by ANDREA POGGIPOLLINI, with an introduction by MARTHA COOLEY
Andrea Poggipollini is a Bologna-based artist who works in multiple media. His summer-long installation “Omnipresence” in the medieval borgo (walled village) of Castiglione del Terziere in Lunigiana, Tuscany, featured sculpture, photography, video, and excerpts from poems by Loris Jacopo Bononi. Bononi, an Italian writer (earlier in his career, a doctor), writes poetry and prose; his work has been lauded by Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. He is the author of Trilogia (Diario postumo, Miserere dei, and Il poeta muore), Libri e Destini, and other texts.
Viewers walked through the borgo to encounter Poggipollini’s and Bononi’s collaboration in unexpected places: on placards on walls high and low, windows, on the ground, and in cellars. Among the installation’s elements were life-sized sculptures of human figures in black or white—kneeling, standing, sitting—which materialized as unexpectedly as phantoms on stone walls, in a bell-tower, and on the balcony of the village’s once-grandest house, now abandoned. In a passageway between two buildings were photographs by Poggipollini of sculptures he’d previously made, to which Bononi’s poetry-excerpts are an implicit response.
The photographs of Poggipollini’s work are echoes of echoes of echoes, one might say.
I last spoke to Abu Musa in March 2003, the week the Iraq war began. It was late afternoon, Syria time, when I called from my apartment in Washington, DC. I waited several minutes while the shopkeeper across the hall—the only resident in Abu Musa’s building with a telephone—summoned my former music teacher from his apartment.
I might have caught Abu Musa in the midst of a nap; he made me repeat my name three times.
At last, he laughed. “It can’t be,” he said. His voice, low-pitched, buoyant, was thick with cigarettes and fatigue. “Where are you? Are you still in America?”
When I said I was, I felt him smiling in disbelief. “You could be next door,” he said. “You could be down the street.”
By KELWYN SOLE
I want what comes after:
the first lifted bucket’s clang
once the rooster’s all crowed out,
a keen thirst for fresh water
as sequel to that sound
Writing in Place is a column in which authors published in our print and web pages tell us about their writing spaces.
I write in a glass-sided room, an addition to a 1950s brick bungalow, southern style. From the threshold that once led to the outdoors, it’s just one giant stride to my desk: space enough to tap at a keyboard, or lie down; for books and papers to breed, but not for dancing (a tiny tango when someone says yes).
When I vomit
it will be through my forehead.
Be warned, stand far off
because the vomit will not spare you.
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