The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter
hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room”
where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.
1.
In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.
By DOLORS MIQUEL
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN
Sparrowhearts
The women of my family family
hunted hunted birds, sparrows, birds, sparrows, and they made them sing
sing day in day out day in day out day in as the pots boiled, inner courtyards
wide open,
washtubs soaked old naked motheaten watery
unrinsed firstwashed clothes
and the windows opened, gave birth, opened
so beauty would regale them with songs and flowers and flowers and songs,
buzzing, zigzagging, chirping, whispering,
not understanding that they understood nothing. Nothing at all.
By IRENE PUJADAS
Translated by JULIA SANCHES
Spurred by the idea that you are interdependent and would do well to lean on others (on the opinions, advice, and experiences of others), you’re roped into taking part in a general meeting to decide your future.
Some of your friends bring folders filled with graphs and statistics. One in particular comes bearing the works of authors, philosophers, historians, and psychoanalysts. Relevant passages are marked with Post-it notes.
Your family and friends only want what’s best for you, or rather, they want you to do something.
By MERCÈ IBARZ
Translated by MARA FAYE LETHEM
Close, so close he can already taste it. This afternoon he’ll become the owner of a secret. But first he’ll have lunch with his mother, who’s waiting for him at the restaurant in the back of the Boqueria Market, and once he’s got her home safely, he’ll meet up with the current owner of a Picasso engraving and he’ll buy it.
It was an early afternoon in mid-July, the sun at the height of its powers, and while Laura was stirring a gin and tonic, her co-workers were stretching their picket line across the parking lot of the New Epoch shoe factory. Sitting in a wicker chair on the stained deck of the palatial home of the floor supervisor and his wife, a cool breeze sweeping through the overhanging trees, her ears buzzing with the chirping of birds and the bubbling of the pool filter, Laura told herself she never wanted to be here. She knew any deal between workers and management had to be made with the backing of the entire factory floor. Otherwise, the bosses would try to pick them off one by one, like lions to lagging gazelle. Still, it had been decided she would accept the supervisor’s offer to negotiate over dinner, if not to strike a deal, then at least to feel the man out.
The screen door to the house screeched open, and Laura turned to find her supervisor’s wife, Fatimah, stepping out onto the deck with a tray of charcuterie and a pair of fresh drinks.
Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.
Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,
the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.
From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was
hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running
is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug
out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall
for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.
Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com
By ADRIENNE SU
I had had my fill,
but I kept devoting more
days, then weeks to it,
buying books, making
no plans, as if empty slots
would well up with rain,
pushing anyone
who might edge into my space
away as if by
natural forces.
I never pledged anything
permanent to it,
Photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
On July 4, 1981, something caught Evie Weinstein’s eye as she was washing dishes in a tidal pool on Eastern Egg Rock, a treeless island off the Maine coast. An Atlantic puffin, a football-sized seabird, emerged from the pea-soup fog with something dangling from its beak. Evie dropped the dishpan, grabbed the binoculars slung around her neck, and saw that the puffin had a beak-load of fingerling fish. She had been waiting for this moment and knew at once what it meant: the bird was bringing food for a chick—a puffling, as they are called in children’s books—the first to hatch on the island in a century, and the first seabird hatched anywhere as the result of a conscious human effort to restore them to a place from which they had been exterminated.
I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.
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