By DAVID MILLS
From my row house mailbox, I fished
an envelope: no address, just “David.”
scrawled. In my room, I read: e-mails
bounced back, calls orphaned. If you’re
alive and don’t want to talk I get it.
Though six hours across the Atlantic
is much farther than six along it. If
need be, I will kneel before your grave.
here’s my number. just in case.
By AHMED NAJI
Translated from the Arabic by BEN KOERBER
1
Antar Harami’s kingdom stretches from the iron bridge to the gristmills in the east, and from the El Gaz drainage canal southward all the way to the police checkpoint at the International Hospital.
As the parakeet-green municipal bus pulled into Cuddalore, Sai held his sign up as high as he could, his forehead burning from the morning sun. He did not want the reporter to miss him.
The sign was flimsy, made of two pieces of printer paper taped together, but it was sufficient.
He’d written SARA, THE NEW YORK TIMES in thick capital letters with a black marker. He knew of only a handful of women doing serious journalism, mostly Barkha Dutt copycats. His favorite female journalist was actually a character from the movie Gandhi. He had rented it when he was in college in Chennai and watched it alone. He was instantly smitten with the actress who played the Time magazine photographer from America, charmed by the way her short, wavy hair bounced as she squatted to the ground to take pictures of the Mahatma spinning cotton on his chakkaram.
lit by her fire, I was the scorched
tree Clare West found
direction by; a swiftly drawn arrow
became a drawn hood; an era gone
By LOGAN LANE
FROM: Tracy Burks <dreamcatcher@archcorp.com>
TO: Office of Coordination <officeofcoordination@archcorp.com>
SUBJECT: How the Cookie Crumbles
DATE: August 3, 2043
FROM THE DESK OF TRACY BURKS
Dear Interns,
I will make this short but not sweet, unlike the chocolate delicacy at the center of this blunder:
Whoever is eating cookies in The Loomery, cease. Did you not see the signs in the hall outside? Did you not read the pamphlets on initiation day? Surely not, because you would’ve noticed they read in large Impact font: DO NOT EAT INSIDE THE LOOMERY.
By SARA MUNJACK
Ascención
I’ve fallen into an ant pile.
I fight to stand up and shake off
a million legs whispering
across my skin.
I keep dreaming of Chon
before he was my grandfather. A boy
hiding in the desert for days surviving
on nopales y ardillas.
By TERRI WITEK
I ask my sons what they want from St. Hieronymos, too old to befriend. Red hat, my dead son says. Fat book, my live son requests. No one mentions a lion, meandered in.
The lion asks for an edit= do these sons mark jars filled with body parts? Baboon son, jackal son? They flatten to black-rimmed eyes. No.
I climb through mountain sons. They are finding how far blue takes them. They are learning the ropy muscles of a man (higher animus/ they r anonymous) becalmed in a cave mouth. His red hat and book, the little fire.
By TARA SKURTU
We pass a lighthouse and you tell me the legend—
a seer, an emperor, his daughter, the snakebite;
the tower he built to keep her at the edge of the sea—
when an old woman passes us on the ferry,
sniffs us twice, You are in love, I smelled it!
and last night on the island, over fresh fish
and a pitcher of ice-cloudy raki, I asked how
many words for love in your language:
By TOM PAINE
When I first became a bee I was just so nectar naïve.
I tumbled over petals waving my antennae frantically.
Then, when I was living life as a flower and not a bee,
well, to back up: this is tragic: I didn’t identify as flower
By MATT DONOVAN
| There’s the phrase once again—The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun—this time pasted on a Subaru’s fender, its rote answer tagging along in a faded Wild West font. Today, though, idling in traffic, instead of knee-jerk counterarguments and a few remembered memes, I’m thinking of a guy I met in Newtown, Connecticut, who had a son in the first grade at Sandy Hook Elementary when the shooting took place. His kid is alive—that should be said from the outset—but since the guy was teaching science at the middle school across town when the frantic texts and rumors and lockdown began, for a few hours he wasn’t sure if his son had been shot. His son is alive because the shooter chose to step into a different classroom, but at first no one knew what had happened, including the guy’s wife as she drove up to the school to build gingerbread houses and instead found an empty car blocking the road with the driver’s door open. By then she could smell gunpowder searing the air. By then there were sirens in the distance and soon a police officer held the gathered parents back as a group of children came running, one of whom was covered in blood and said, as she reached for her mom there in the crowd, I’m alright, but the other kids are dead. All of which is one reason why, when the emails and online postings began claiming that there hadn’t been a shooting, that all of these parents were lying, that the grief of Sandy Hook was being performed, the guy’s wife felt compelled to respond, to say what happened had happened. I was there, she wrote back, I was there. But the voices continued, a chorus that wouldn’t stop calling the guy’s wife liar, conspirator, no matter what facts she gave. When the threats began—I’m bad for people’s health, someone wrote on her Instagram. Wait until I find your children—the guy and his wife went to the police who said there was nothing they could do. Passwords were changed, users were blocked: the taunts continued. After she wrote The stalking needs to stop, someone responded by posting a picture of their son they had found online and wrote This is stalking, bitch. Which is when the guy renewed his permit to carry a gun and began slipping his .45 into its holster whenever he left the house. Perhaps you think you know where this is going. Perhaps this seems as predictable as any sloganeering phrase. Except this story refuses to be reduced to a single phrase. The guy kept his gun close, not knowing what else to do. When he felt its heft—running errands or driving his car—maybe it seemed as if order could be restored, a sense that he might be able to stop the worst thing from becoming still worse. One morning, the guy drove to the middle school where he’d been teaching for years and, running late for a meeting, he stepped into the building still carrying the gun in a holster under his coat. Maybe he wasn’t thinking. Maybe it was carelessness, arrogance, indifference to the rules. The guy knows that calling this a mistake doesn’t cut it. Closer would be some word that doesn’t exist for a fuck-up spilling out of desperation or perhaps a desire to shield while also circumventing grief and trying to find some kind of foothold in the wake of twenty children being shot in his hometown. But the guy isn’t interested in the words we might choose. Instead, he’s thinking about the choices he should have made instead of strolling to the photocopier to prepare for class and watching the machine’s light flare a few times across his hands as he pressed and held a book’s spine before he was approached by the principal and asked to lift up his jacket. He knew then he’d be leaving in handcuffs. He didn’t yet know that he’d lose his teaching license or that the prosecutor’s first offer would be a year in prison with a four-year suspended sentence. That without written permission he could never again pick up his son after school, or attend school events, or vote at a public school. That any future employer would see his mugshot online. That some of his friends in town would never speak to him again, and instead he’d find himself standing in a shaded corner of his yard, unemployed, listening to the traffic push past, telling his story to some guy who, for whatever it’s worth, didn’t know what words to say. |
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