By BETSY TAYLOR
Casey delivered pharmaceuticals, body parts, and body fluids to nursing homes and medical facilities. He drove the graveyard shift. One night, for no good reason, I decided to tag along.
We decided we’d stop for the night in Denver while eating at a Taco Johns in North Platte, Nebraska, and scanned the Expedia app on my phone. There was a 4-star hotel in the suburbs northwest of the city on sale for 86 bucks, so I reserved a room because it was the same price as the Best Western.
Author’s Note
These “color swatch poems” are taken from a larger work in progress called Mutterfarbe, a book of experimental translations and poems using Goethe’s Theory of Colors as a primary source.
Each of the colors and their names were pulled from the landscapes and built environments I inhabited during my travels throughout France in early 2015. The nine images at the top correspond with each color swatch poem, and represent those landscapes/built environs. The “Anhang” (appendix) at the end features lines I translated from Goethe’s text on color theory—each numbered line corresponding with one of the color swatches to create a new poetic text.
Today the corn is new, no higher than my knee, and at this height it has a special color: luminous green under the overcast sky. The clouds are thick and dark, like a stew. For some, this place might seem always the same: the corn growing, the looming mountain, the lone trees far off across the fields still and silent, punctuating the view. But for me there is always something to see.
By KURT CASWELL
Polar Bear (Sow), Near Kaktovik, Barter Island, Alaska
North of the Long Range Mountains in spring time, where the road swings east off the long northerly climb up the west coast, and a little farther on, back to the north again to the land’s end on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a place where Norsemen and women came ashore 500 years before Columbus, and the great icebergs, calved off the great Greenland ice sheet, march along the eastern shore with the currents of the North Atlantic: here, in this place, a polar bear passed by.
By GEOFF KRONIK
I was in Hamburg for a language course, and all week the syntactical floodwaters of German grammar had been rising. By Thursday night I was drowning in homework and would need Friday morning, before my afternoon class, to stay afloat.
Then the friend I was staying with, a German lawyer, suggested I join him in court the next morning. I could attend a session with him, see the German system, meet a German judge. An appealing prospect that alas would leave no time for homework.
By STEVEN MOORE
1.
After training in Mississippi we flew to the southern part of California and trained for two more weeks in the desert. After the desert it was time to move again. In Maine, middle-aged women and their kids waved flags along the ramp leading from the skyway to the terminal. They were cheering. Shaking all our hands as we moved down the ramp. There were kids, too, and the kids seemed less sure of what was happening. Like they knew that we hadn’t done anything yet to deserve this and they were confused about the cause of the praise, like I was. Or they knew exactly where we were going. And they were confused about the cause of the praise. When the refueling of our plane was completed we shook their hands again on the way out.
Then
it was a
place refracted
by the prism of history and
still in a kind of shock
of the past,
By JOHN MARTIN
Even viewed from a distance, the harborfront tests the capacities of peripheral vision, tall masts and rigging far off to the right, and in front of us, here, clumsy, rectangular structures painted white with enormous, clear windows that darken in the afternoons.
By MEGAN HARLAN
My first day in Bukit Tinggi, a town in the rain forest-swathed mountains of West Sumatra—a region home to the Minangkabau ethnic group, the world’s largest matrilineal society—I swore I heard a woman calling the Muslim midday prayer broadcasting from a white mosque.
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