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I’ve been watching the Qasr al Hosn. Watching it since I arrived in August. The boarded-up block below my office window withholds this oldest structure in Abu Dhabi—the whitewashed fort—and the arch-studded building of the Cultural Foundation. The block has so much potential, but for months, nothing’s happened. Or, I’ll see a kick up of dust and realize it was the wind.
On the walk to Central Station I struggled to obey simple gravity. My limbs felt weightless, my feet didn’t feel at all. With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea.
By TARA DEAL
It has the name of a bug and sounds so ugly, like nonsense, but Morpion is real, a sliver of the slightest fantasy island in the Caribbean. One small circle, perfectly uninhabited, with a single palm tree stuck in its ice-cream-colored sand. No waves to speak of, though there is some soft lapping of warm water. A lullaby at the end of the journey.
ZINZI CLEMMONS interviews MARIE-HELENE BERTINO
Marie-Helene Bertino published her debut collection of short stories, Safe As Houses, in 2012. It won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and was long listed for the Story Prize, and for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She hails from Philadelphia (where Zinzi Clemmons is also from and currently lives) and resides in Brooklyn. Bertino served for six years as the Associate Editor of One Story. Bertino and Clemmons corresponded via email about their hometown and the writing process.
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Zinzi Clemmons (ZC): In nearly everything I’ve read about you, you mention that you’re from Philadelphia. I counted two stories in your book, Safe As Houses, explicitly set in the city: “North Of” and “Great, Wondrous.” Most people’s relationships to their hometowns are complicated. How would you describe your feelings toward your home city?
Marie-Helene Bertino (MHB): Philadelphia is a difficult city to explain. There is some seriously dark beauty there, and some serious dysfunction. I think the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is an example of Philly at its best, taking what it is specifically good at — its tenacious, stubborn spirit, and the courage to take risks — to stamp the city with gorgeous murals. These murals have become the city’s complexion. You can’t go far without seeing one, and I mean from Center City to West Philly to where I grew up, in the Northeast. No other city I’ve visited looks like that. It is specific to the spirit of Philly.
Book by JANE SATTERFIELD
Reviewed by
Throughout her impressive body of work, which includes three collections of poetry and a memoir, Jane Satterfield explores the roles of place and gender in human identity. Born in England and raised in America, she probes what it means to reconcile the legacies of intertwined lineages. Satterfield complicates her inquiry into cultural inheritance by emphasizing female experience. In her first poetry book, Shepherdess with an Automatic, she described her youthful adventures during the 1980s; “going to clubs” in “boots with zip-laces to accelerate the kill” (in contrast to1950s housewives “decked out” like “living dolls”). Her Familiars, Satterfield’s most recent collection, takes us further back in time, to the 1970s. We glimpse her as a girl scout, part of a “troop of girls kitted out in jumpers, cable knee socks, & small green berets,” living “blissful on suburban streets” while “choppers stuttered over Saigon.” Both books, as well as her second poetry collection Assignation at Vanishing Point, combine coming-of-age material with adulthood examinations of love, sex, child rearing, historical influence, and literary ambition. In Her Familiars, Satterfield widens her range of subject matter, tones, and aesthetic approaches, mining the territory between domestic and public life in striking new ways.
Two weeks ago today, I woke up reading an email that Watertown was closed. The Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown police departments had sealed a perimeter. No entrance, no exit. The office was closed. I had started working for a landscape architecture practice in Watertown that Monday, the morning of the Marathon. After three months on the city’s outskirts, writing full-time, at last I had started traveling around Boston and Cambridge. The Lockdown froze the city in its novelty for me.
The second-place horse in the 2008 Kentucky Derby, Eight
Belles, collapsed with shattered front fetlocks just after
crossing the finish line. She was euthanized on the track.
The first pest to make itself known in the orchard was the stinkbug, malevolent and focused. It worked at the sap in the fruit, sucking the water from the flesh, leaving behind gnarls and distortions—catfacing, Mona heard it called, though the injured peaches she plucked from her trees’ branches looked nothing like a cat’s face, but more a woman’s, withered by sun.
mermaid legs/ whiskers/ open mouth/ callipygian bark/
semen sap/ elbow fold/ knees/ arms stretched above a head/
torso swung upside down/ hair sweeping the ground/
breasts/ cave turned inside out/ toes holding on/
eye socket/ palm/ thumb/ twisting veins/ freckle/ bellybutton/
vulva/ ghost fetus/ nose/ nipple/ thigh/ petrified cloud
By PABLO NERUDA
The Isla Negra wildflowers
are blooming,
they have no names, some
seem like sand crocuses,
others
illuminate
the ground with yellow lighting.
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