There is something in me that loves an island. I live on one (Queens, New York, on Long Island, across the East River from the isle of Manhattan). I’m attracted to all kinds—those buried by volcanic eruptions; adrift in a blue void endless as the cosmos; locus of nearly extinct languages; and even the fictitious Island of Lost Souls ruled by the mad scientist Dr. Moreau.
By NOOR QASIM
I wake up from my three-hour nap because of a text from my brother.
I’ll be there in five!
After reading some texts and checking Facebook, I summon the strength to pull myself off the mattress, leaving the sheets damp with sweat behind me, and approach the red-framed mirror on the bright yellow wall of our hostel room. The nap had been good and deep but my head feels swollen with the heat and the grogginess of an interrupted sleep cycle. My eye-makeup is slightly smudged, which makes sense considering I’d applied it five minutes before I passed out. It didn’t have time to dry.
I was not allowed to walk or ride my bike along the highway without an adult. “Blonde hair and blue eyes,” my grandma would tell me. “Just the kind they’d want to steal.” As though at any moment, I could be taken and sold for profit like a chunk of copper wire.
“They’re not gonna steal me, Grandma,” I would tell her. “I’m too mouthy.”
Portland was vibrant, despite its mistiness; always threatening to rain, but never truly downpouring. G. and I walked up and down Fore Street, looking for the restaurant by the same name, trying not to look too much like lost tourists. We had escaped to Portland in search of good food, which was always a comfort to us and which we needed now more than ever. Finishing our undergraduate degrees a few weeks earlier had left us feeling more somber and empty than excited. After days of enduring many heartfelt goodbyes from friends we knew we’d never see again and lengthy advice from proud, overbearing relatives, we were aching to get away from it all; to distract ourselves from the constant reminders that a chapter in our lives was closing forever.
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.
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Celebrating 15 Years