All posts tagged: Dispatch

Fathom

By SARA RYAN

 

Photo courtesy of author.

Norfolk, Virginia/Virginia Beach, Virginia

 

When the whales wash up on shore, my friend grieves. I feel it too, but it feels further away. Deep in me, treading water, legs furiously churning under the surface. The first whale washes up on the oceanfront, just off the boardwalk. People drive out to stare at it. Its dark wet form deflates into the sand. I dont drive to find it but think of it all day.

I scroll through the Facebook comments that claim its all the fault of the offshore windmills, the sonic waves mapping the ocean floor pummeling through the ocean. Everybody seems to have watched the same hoax-y documentary funded by the oil industry. But of course, its the boats. The whales scarred and torn up by container ships. 165,000 tons of steel running into migration paths.

I tell my friend how they necropsy the whale, cut it from tip to tail—they call it peeling the banana.” Then, they cut it into small pieces and bury it right on the beach. My friend wails but Im not sure how real her emotion is. She wants to dig into the beach to find the bones. She disappears from my life just as quickly as she shimmered into it—she goes to the swamp in Florida and never returns.

I am alone again, and another whale washes up. And another. And another. In the Outer Banks, a minke whale. Another, a juvenile humpback female. A common cause of death is entanglement—shattered vertebrae, inability to swim, caught in fishing nets. I, too, feel very tangled up. I cannot put into words the size of the sadness I feel.

I look at the striped belly of the humpback whale. Her huge frowning mouth. In a YouTube video, the waves push her back and forth on the sand, but she never returns to the water. She likely weighs over two thousand pounds.

I am afraid for myself and the whales. I am afraid for my friend, who worries that she will accidentally kill the child that she hopes for. Before her disappearance, every Tuesday and Thursday at lunch, she tells me she wants to die. There are only so many times I can hear it before I stop sleeping. She pours everything into me.

I cry on the shore, just looking for somewhere to put my sadness. Everything that fills me up. I am floating like a buoy, gathering barnacles and gulls. I become a shell, a hollow tube strung through with wire.

Only two windmills have been constructed in the ocean off the coast of Virginia Beach, over twenty-six miles from the shore. Some people, dining at the rooftop restaurant of the oceanfront Marriott swear they can see them turning. Still, the birds continue singing.

Facebook commenters continue posting:
where are the spineless wastes of oxygen who care so much about this planet”
the sonar”
the windmills”
heartbreaking”
this is no mystery”
stop lying”
all those kids with a photo of a dead whale on their phone”

Norfolk, Virginia, is home to the largest naval base in the world. The ships are being built in a circle around the city—the banging never ceases. Every man I meet works for the shipyard or on base. Many of them never sail the ocean, but they build upon it.

The gales churn across the state and flood the streets with water. The cement walls in my building weep with moisture. A whale skull washes up on a beach in North Carolina and the news article is titled, Oh, Whale!” I want to tell my friend, but she is already too far away, wandering the aisles of IKEA, looking at baby blankets, thinking about dying.

I think it is only inevitable before we see each other on the beach. On an oily downtown street, getting watery iced teas. At the local museum, staring at strings of floating pink glass. 

The whales skull is gray and dark—it looks like a stone from an alien world. I wish I could pick it up and carry it. Seven whales wash up on the East Coast in thirty-eight days, and everyone is screaming. It is so easy to invent an apocalypse. I, too, sometimes wish the world was ending.

I watch an ant crawl across my notebook on the table outside the coffee shop and it is a smallness I cannot fathom. In the same way, I stare at the schooners docked at the harbor festival—all the ropes tangling and flapping in the strong winds. Ill never know where they lead.

A fathom measures how deep the water is—the unit of measure is six feet. It comes from the Old English word meaning outstretched arms.” Perhaps it is an embrace, a closeness, as our hands stretch further and further apart.

 

 

 

Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity. Her work has been published in Brevity, Kenyon Review, Diode, and others. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan University.

Fathom
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Glass: Five Sonnets

By MONIKA CASSEL

Author’s Note:

Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.

 

a train pulls up to a subway platform

Photo courtesy of author. 

 

Berlin, Germany

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939

We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn
underground station Potsdamer Platz and AnhalterBahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.

—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
    Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938

Glass: Five Sonnets
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When I Go to Chicago

By SHELLEY STENHOUSE

A small table set for breakfast: mashed grapefruit, berries, a Raisin Bran box, two spoons, and a short glass of dark liquid. To the right of the place setting is a stack of newspapers, including the Chicago Sun Times.

Chicago, Illinois

things break. The last time, on the last day, the pipes in the kitchen burst and flooded my parents’ blonde wood floor. When I’m up in that 87th floor apartment, I look at the sky’s blank expression. I keep the little square office window open for the sliver of nature. It’s hard to read with Fox News blaring, so I drift from room to room.

Each time before I fly to Chicago, I lose my debit card. This time it leapt out of my raincoat pocket on my way to the grocery store and refused to reappear. I had the new one shipped straight to the Hancock.

When I Go to Chicago
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Dispatch from Marutha Nilam

Poems by SUKIRTHARANI, ILAMPIRAI, and SAKTHI ARULANANDHAM

Translated from the Tamil by THILA VARGHESE

 

Table of Contents:

  • Sukirtharani, “For the sake of living”
  • Ilampirai, “Loot”
  • Sakthi Arulanandham, “Land Grabbing Bird” 

 

Black and white image of a bird with a long neck

Drawing by Sakthi Arulanandham for her poem “Land Grabbing Bird.”

 

Marutha Nilam (The agricultural and plains region)

For the sake of living
By Sukirtharani

In the courtyard filled with
bubbling water flowing from
the palm-leaf thatched roof
during monsoons,
grew a golden shower tree.
On that tree, yellow flowers
bloomed in clusters.
There was a nest on the tree
where sparrows with short beaks
would be chirping incessantly.
Sitting under the shade of the tree,
I would be studying passers-by.

Dispatch from Marutha Nilam
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Dispatch from Camelback Mountain

By CHRISTOPHER AYALA

A mountainous terrain in Arizona with a cloudy blue sky in the backgroundPhoenix, AZ

Camelback’s faces wither in the sun. I used to hate Arizona and coming here and then I moved here and hated it and left and now all I think about is a good summer day and the lazy way a person can be themselves sifting through the desert, eating pizza, all that kind of stuff anyone does anywhere else, except then this mountain Camelback is available to burn off all those cheese calories. And that’s not the same everywhere. There is a part of me who everyday thinks of being back in Arizona walking around blistering days, laughing how when I had them to myself, I had thought this was the end of the line, that there had never been a worse place on earth. That’s mid-thirties type clarity.

Dispatch from Camelback Mountain
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In fall, the persimmon trees light their lanterns

By CHRISTY TENDING 

Beppu-shi, Oita Prefecture, Japan

From beyond the waves, looking back at the shore, civilization betrays itself. The aging amusement park—its sign hasnt been illuminated in years and the ferris wheel creaks under the weight of a glance—still perches on the hill. There are hotels, a communications tower, a shopping mall: each bows its head to the context of an environment that cannot wait to overtake it. The wooden faces of homes have settled themselves in intimate relationship: in or among the bamboo, against the mountain, above the valley, over the sea.

In fall, the persimmon trees light their lanterns
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Water Shrine

By ANGELA SUCICH

Shrine surrounded by dozens of water bottles

Photo courtesy of Viviana Gaeta.

Córdoba Province, Argentina

We drive past a great mound of plastic bottles,
the shimmering of a lake siloed into a thousand
tiny two-liters.

Water Shrine
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The Laws of Time and Physics

By JESSICA PETROW-COHEN

A sunny, cobblestone street framed by buildings with flat, golden-yellow facades. Ivy creeps between the buildings, hanging above the path.

Rome, Italy

I am tangled up in time. My body is the fine silver of my necklace, tying knots through curls of hair. I am the feeling of trying to untangle its spindled chain with too thick fingers, tips all pink, reaching for a dexterity they just don’t have. I’m caught up like that. Strangled.

The Laws of Time and Physics
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