Translated by FADWA AL QASEM
Like everyone else on the train to Roskilde, his eye was caught by the woman in the tattered dress handing out candy to all the children in the carriage. When she reached him she gave him a piercing look and said, “Although I usually give candy to children only, you deserve a piece, because you’re just a big child yourself.” He took the candy and stuffed it in his jacket pocket as he stared after her until she vanished into the next carriage.
Delhi, Dharmshala, McLeod Ganj, Dharmkot. New friends and newer friends over masala chai. Deodar forest in rain. Mist rising. Monkeys on a cold tin roof, scorpions in the corridor, beetles inside clothes, slugs the size and shape of fallen leaves. Clean, spare, sharply elegant—Vipassana. Silence. Thank you for all the blessings, they came in handy.
By FATIMA AL-MAZROEUI
Translated by KATHARINE HALLS
I talk a lot.
It’s the quality you know me by—not just you, but my neighbors and the people on my street.
Come closer. Don’t move away, and don’t cover your ears, because talking comes instinctively to me, and I get no relief from my exasperation or sadness unless I talk to you. Come closer—don’t sit so far away. The day I told you I was going to leave you, you laughed, and I saw in your eyes a confidence I can never erase from my memory: you were confident I’d never do it, because I’m weak before you. But I’ll conquer that weakness and attempt to forget the memories I have with you.
Artist: FRANCES STROH
“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Cliff Forshaw transposes Dante’s Inferno to Hull, England.
Amherst College posts videos from the various Lit Fest 2016 events. The videos feature Angela Flournoy, Lauren Groff ’01, Deborah Treisman, Harold Augenbraum and Jen Acker ’00.
SARETTA MORGAN interviews MAURICE EMERSON DECAUL
Maurice Emerson Decaul is a poet, essayist, playwright, and librettist, whose work has appeared in The Common, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Narrative, Callaloo, and Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project, among others. A graduate of Columbia and New York Universities, he is currently working toward his MFA at Brown University.
Saretta Morgan corresponded with Decaul over several weeks by email, in person, and on the phone during the winter of 2015–2016. Both poets and military veterans, Morgan and Decaul talked about New Orleans, theater, race, and the military, as their conversation moved between themes of structure, dreams, and collectivity.
Admirers of slim, erotically charged novels will greet Noy Holland’s first novel Bird with a sense of discovery. For fans of her three short story collections, Bird is a satisfying evolution of her lyrical, unsettling prose that ratchets the tension between poetic language and mythic narrative, and feels both deeply modern and ancient.
Bird is a ballad to vanished love, to an erotic connection akin to rapture that the main character, whose nickname is Bird, cannot escape, even though Mickey, her golden bad boy lover, took her places she shouldn’t have gone.
The present is one autumn day 12 years after Mickey’s abrupt departure “in order not to kill her.” Bird is breast-feeding her infant daughter after a difficult birth, her second child. She might be suffering from post-partum depression—certainly she has let herself go. Married to the doctor who treated the wounds Mickey inflicted, she lives in the countryside, trying to find solace in domesticity, but yearning for the thrills of the past.
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