No moon tonight but the white bells of a woman’s
eyes squinting tacitly toward a camera, staring out
from the glossy page of a high school yearbook
on a spring evening that stings like the elegy
By LORE SEGAL
from The Journal I Did Not Keep
If I had kept a journal in the early fifties, when I was new in New York, I would have marked the day on which I saw the basalt bowl in a store window in Greenwich Village. It was small, and had an in-curling rim and the finest matte black finish. It cost fifteen dollars, almost half my monthly salary, so I got back on the subway and went home. I could not get the thing out of my mind. I desired it. “Beauty,” Stendhal said, “is the promise of happiness.” There was the Saturday I took the subway to the Village, but my bowl was gone.
It might have been twenty years later when I could afford the large basalt platter with a rim that flattens outward. It was a handsome piece, but it did not redeem the thwarted love for that first small black bowl.
By AHMED BOUZFOUR
Translated by NASHWA GOWANLOCK
Marzouka’s lips are wet
Marzouka? She’s carrying a bundle wrapped in a cloth on her back, and her earrings sparkle. Marzouka comes closer, and I move closer to her. The sun is scorching, and her large earrings are blinding. Should I greet her? I kiss her hand, so she kisses me on my forehead. I kiss her cheek, red like the late-afternoon sun. “Let me be your son,” I say to her. “And carry me like that bundle on your back.”
1
the inexpressible isn’t that which cannot
be expressed but that which will fall
expressed upon deaf eardrums meet with
sightless eyes centerfolded even
or on the front cover it will escape notice
and upon the face itself remain undetected
because mere expression isn’t all it takes
to be detected to be reasonably considered
expressed to others brothers sisters cousins
or indeed a disinterested passerby
hiding all in plain sight and only the fool thinks
no wait the fool does not even think that
no mystery is gone missing from his equation
a haze of sadness covering what is truly true
Nostalgia is a well-
intentioned wound,
you have to hold
it in mind all at once—
you have to need it
enough. I’ve been
By L.S. KLATT
I would kill for the feeling of television.
I felt it once. I felt it holster light.
I felt it clutch me in the dark and treble
my house. All the houses. I felt the firefight
I think of all the ways
the women in my family have died,
the slow disease of genetics and childbirth
here in the curve of my cheekbone.
By EMMA SLOLEY
The cemetery where she meets him after work is both vertiginous and claustrophobic. The graves are crowded closely together, like huddled children cowering from punishment, then there is a short stretch of lawn tilting to the cliff’s edge, and beyond that a sickening void she imagines rushing out to meet her. Why would it occur to someone to build a cemetery on a steep escarpment above the Pacific Ocean? The weed-hemmed tombstones are cracked and bleached. No one has been buried here for ages; they’re all in the fashionable new cemetery out near the airport. The paths are strewn with shards of glass, the torn petals of sad plastic flowers, scraps of trash, and shriveled cigarette butts, and the whole thing might have an air of tawdriness if not for that view: blinding blue sky sliced horizontally by the cliff edge, the wild ocean below. The audacious, swaggering drama of it.
Two Men and a Truck are here to haul our
piano away to a nice woman’s
house, who’s agreed to move it to own
it, so her children can learn to play. An hour
early, two men in the truck pass a pipe
while on my open porch I read
the sports page. I see ribbons of smoke peel
from the open truck window. The ripe
To see the unseeable, measure
its shadow. It takes eight telescopes
on six mountains and
four continents
ten days.
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