Sweet joy, sweet joy, I hum against the kitten cry of my newborn daughter, three days old, who directs her distress at my dry nipple. Home today from the hospital and no milk yet in my breasts. Since the doctors cut her out of me, she has been living on fat reserves and a few drops of the sticky, yellow colostrum I squeeze from my body into her rooting mouth. Baby wolf trying to howl, no sound coming out. Baby polar bear burrowing into white, substance-less snow.
By KEANE SHUM
We stood among the wreckage of the barangay captain’s house and his furniture shop and his crumbled internet café, where three months ago you could put a ten peso coin in and for a few minutes connect from this little island to the world out there, beyond Cancobato Bay, the San Juanico Strait and Tacloban. CPU shells lay stacked up like carcasses against one of the few walls still standing, ghosts in the machines, severed cables and keyboard drawers jutting out like compound fractures. The barangay captain has not had time to rebuild. He has a job to do; he is the barangay captain.
I arrived by evening train from Kyiv, the trees along the tracks slicing through orange light outside my window, an erratic metronome whose meter would set the pace for my three years as a Peace Corps ESL teacher in the village town of Radyvyliv. There would be long camp days with my students stretching into what would feel like weeks, winter flu quarantine days when I would stay indoors to write bad prose until I fell into a deep sleep as the early morning light broke, hours and hours of reading Gogol by candlelight and trying to conjure up some ghost of lunatic inspiration—but in those first few days of struggling to find a grip on the culture, in those first few hours with my host family, everything arrived and departed at a rapid pace. I knew just enough Ukrainian to know how much more I needed to learn, and how little time I had to learn it before I would begin to look like an idiot. Peace Corps had arranged for me to live with a host family for the first month of my stay before moving to an apartment, and I was terrified of insulting these people with my ignorance of all things Ukrainian.
The day after Thanksgiving, my parents and I drive from Laramie to Winter Park in a rental Buick. We go to see what we hear is worth seeing in Colorado, and we confuse it for all that there is.
We stop in Walden, just south of the Wyoming border and the Medicine Bow mountains. I wonder if the name has anything to do with Thoreau, or if names in the West aren’t after names in the East like names in the East are after places and people in England. I need a bathroom break and my father says it’d be nice to stretch his legs.
His friends ask us why we’d go to Liverpool. We don’t have an answer to give them and I forget the true one. We look at each other, shrug and say we’d heard it’s the most romantic city in the world.
Baku is a city intent on reinventing itself block by steady block. Apartment high-rises and office buildings from the Soviet ‘70s — pock-marked and stained gray by pollution — are transformed in white stone at a frightening pace. Baku today reminds me more of Vienna or Zagreb than a former Soviet republic that clings to the edge of the Caspian Sea.
The crowds are a loaded pincushion
that pricks me as I lean into
the human tide. The rotunda’s marble
Towards Algiers
The desert scatters
on our feet. It’s the only
surrender that counts,
vast, unobstructed.
By JUAN ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ IGLESIAS
Translated by CURTIS BAUER
Todas y cada una de las cosas
del mundo tienen hoy exactitud
matinal. Esta dulce luz de Málaga
declara una vez más la equivalencia
entre la realidad y el paraíso.
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