To get to Shanghai I take a Boeing 777 airplane to a Buick van to an Airbus 320 airplane to a Bombadier subway car to a Hyundai taxicab to a Shinkansen high-speed train to a Xiali taxi. This is China. This is a country in motion.
By KURT CASWELL
Bending to a high-power telescope trained on the moon at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, specifically the terminator line that is the far reach of the sun’s light at this phase—waning Gibbous moon—the contrast of light and dark makes visible the rims and floors of uncountable impact craters. My companion and I can see the crater walls, the striated lines of some long past moment of chaos, the crusted lip of the crater’s edge where the force of that energy lifted and curled into a rift of moon rocks. The sun’s light on the lunar surface is so mesmerizing along that line, so utterly beautiful, that coming away from the eyepiece, all you can see is moon.
On the walk to Central Station I struggled to obey simple gravity. My limbs felt weightless, my feet didn’t feel at all. With each step, I had to remind myself to touch pavement again, as if in a moment’s forgetfulness I might slip the earth’s magnetic pull and go pinwheeling over Sydney Harbor and out to sea.
By TARA DEAL
It has the name of a bug and sounds so ugly, like nonsense, but Morpion is real, a sliver of the slightest fantasy island in the Caribbean. One small circle, perfectly uninhabited, with a single palm tree stuck in its ice-cream-colored sand. No waves to speak of, though there is some soft lapping of warm water. A lullaby at the end of the journey.
The second-place horse in the 2008 Kentucky Derby, Eight
Belles, collapsed with shattered front fetlocks just after
crossing the finish line. She was euthanized on the track.
By ROLF YNGVE
We took the fast train to Beijing across hours of deadened countryside where all the trees grow in rows, various heights, but all new and emaciated under the dusting of early leaves. I asked an acquaintance what happened to all the old trees. Was this a result of the Cultural Revolution? He said, maybe they ate them. They ate grass sometimes. Maybe they cut them down for firewood. Now and then you see some that don’t look planted; volunteers, they had been fattened up by age and randomly placed. There are always survivors.
By CURTIS BAUER
Grackles foraging outside of a Whataburger near North Lake Park.
Soon enough the grackles will truth
the yard out back beneath the wires,
the sidewalk cracks, the live oak roots.
They will lose their dying feathers, now glossed
I write to you from what splits my first name. The overpass between two nationalities. The sandbar between the shore and the winking sea. Marie and Helene walk down the street, holding hands. The hyphen contains both of the things it connects, but also a third thing that is neither Marie nor Helene.
The police commander of Quinindé showed up dead in the province of Manabí yesterday, pounds of cocaine and money littering his car. He died, slumped over the steering wheel, his body blistered with bullets. There is the menace of drugs, poverty, and gangs that looms over this city where the two rivers meet. Lately, anonymous flyers have appeared threatening vigilante justice—threatening to take back the town. “We know who you are thieves, murders, gang members,” it says. “And we will bring you a taste of your own poison.”
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