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To Abandon Paradise

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays

That must be the saddest piña colada in the world, I thought as I walked by Barrachina, the restaurant famous for being the birthplace of the Caribbean drink. This was a few months after Hurricane María destroyed everything we knew, and Old San Juan, an epicenter of tourism in Puerto Rico, was still without power. No one was drinking piña coladas. No one remembered that this place was the world’s idea of paradise. A lush, tropical island in the Caribbean with a landscape that offers all shades of green, blue, orange, red, pink, yellow, and purple. White sand and turquoise waters, ripe fruits, and a breeze that smells fresh and salty as the sea or deep and powerful as the soil. The sun is warm all year long, and the tropical humidity just makes it all feel more sensual.

Natal Promise, Natal Debt: On the Recent Poetry of Mara Pastor

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays

By CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE

A Spanish translation follows the English.

Se acabaron las promesas, / decían nuestros carteles.
[The promises have run out, / our signs said.]

So many perfectly good words have been ruined: Promise. Paradise. Free. Even: Like. Love. Friend. We know that the task of the poet is to renovate ruined words, to make language livable again. To make sure the mouth doesn’t hang off its hinges. To make sure the flame of the tongue stays lit in the storm of speech. But what happens when the poet tires of her labor? In English, this word for work is the same as the word for what a woman must do to push a baby out of her body and into the world. Mara Pastor’s new book of poems, Falsa heladería (False Ice Cream Shop) emerges from a double exhaustion and takes a big breath—then lets loose a current of sound—from the other side.

Blaenavon

October 11, 2018 Essays

By RALPH SNEEDEN

We thought it was just going to be a tour of the defunct coal mine’s aboveground facility, which was already troubling enough. The winding wheels and framework for the conveyor system at the “pit head” were like the superstructure of an abandoned carnival, like the one I’d read about near Chernobyl.

Welcome to the Future

July 6, 2018 Essays

By VAL WANG

By lunchtime, Beijing had reached 102 degrees and our four-year old twins were hungry. We’d spent the morning exploring the shadeless Yonghegong Lama temple and now sought out the refuge of the simple vegetarian buffet nearby where my vegetarian husband and I had had a transcendent meal on our last trip six years before. To our dismay, it had been, according to a nearby security guard, demolished. One of our twins emitted hangry squeals, the other went boneless. The air was dense with humidity and pollution. On our way to the temple from the subway stop at the top of Yonghegong Street, we’d passed another, fancier-looking, vegetarian restaurant and so we elbowed our way all the way back up the narrow corridor of manic Buddhist commercialism thick with incense and the calls of hawkers selling religious tchotchkes and crowds of midday worshippers and tourists; we drowned in sweat.

Vanishing Point

November 5, 2017 Essays, Issue 14, Issue 14 Essays

By ANYA VENTURA

We all dreaded the Butterfly Haven, a greenhouse whose thermostat was set to an oppressive eighty degrees. We were tasked with ensuring the museum’s collection of exotic butterflies did not escape into other exhibits—Mysteries of the Marsh, Birds of Chicago, Wild Music—or suffer at the hands of visitors. The Butterfly Haven was a new addition, a garden under glass, the wild and fruit-bearing world reassembled. It was nature trimmed and mail-ordered, the gestation of life contained in a laboratory and maintained through ongoing shipments from Australia, Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. Butterflies died and were replaced in equal number.

We Lived in the Desert, Then

May 11, 2017 Essays

By MARILYN SIDES

Outside the town of Price stretched hundreds of miles of dusty sagebrush ringed by near and far cliffs of dirt and rock. Yet in the little town proper, thanks to a primitive grid of irrigation canals—mud walls buttressed by ancient Model-T wrecks—there were grassy lawns and trees, like the glorious apricot tree under which my father, my mother, my sister, and I sat that late summer Sunday afternoon with the Russian couple whose names I can no longer recall.

Blood and Every Beat

April 30, 2017 Essays, Issue 13, Issue 13 Essays

By MENSAH DEMARY

Disney, the warship, captured the Star Wars universe, firing off in quick succession two movies: The Force Awakens, which continues the picking-over of the Skywalker family bones, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—that is, a side quest between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, which I paid sixty dollars to see, including four sets of black plastic 3-D glasses. Rogue One is proper Star Wars canon because Disney says so: The once-untold story of how the Rebel Alliance—scrappy and in disarray as ever, a true coalition seized by occasional rancor, debate, disagreement, and speeches—steals the schematics of the original Death Star from the Galactic Empire—decidedly more economical in its internal organization than the Rebels, as there is no debate who is Emperor and who is Lord. The Empire’s grip on the galaxy tightens as its weapon of mass planetary destruction nears full operation. The hardscrabble Senate, relic of the felled Republic, appears too busy dissecting its own demise to perhaps take a lesson or two from the other side, who plotted sedition, executed revolution, then brutalized the defeated.

Fraternity

April 26, 2017 Essays, Issue 13, Issue 13 Essays

By ZAK BRECKENRIDGE

He calls me and says, “I got a good North Country story for ya.” Then after the story he says, “I don’t know, man. I just feel like it would be cool to write something about the people up here. They’re such fuckin’ characters.” Or he’ll say, “If we could just write something about Mom and Dad, you know. I think our upbringing was super unique.” He has also talked about writing rants about people who don’t know the fucking speed limits around here, who hold him up on the two-lane highways that wind through our mountains. Or about making a website that would provide snarky news about the North Country, with headlines like Wilburs Still Fucking Inbred and Way to Fuck It Up, APA. We’ve been having one-way conversations about his writing projects for years. Sometimes he talks about working on them together, and sometimes he talks about doing it himself. I tend not to say much.

Current Obligations

April 7, 2017 Essays

By PAMELA SCHMID

Dear Brian:

I hope you don’t mind my addressing you this way. You addressed me as P., after all—no last name. Although we’ve never met, you offered condolences for my loss.

Linnahall

March 17, 2017 Essays

By DAVID WEINSTEIN

Photo by the author.

I’m afraid I may be lost. I begin down a brick street with St. Olaf’s Church on my right. Its towering spire, a rusty green, has become my lodestar. I rotate my map about ten different times before hesitating down Pikk, the main thoroughfare. This street name is typical in Estonia, where the letters so often occur in pairs. Yesterday afternoon, when I checked into the Hotel Braavo, I thought the spelling had been a mistake. By now I’ve largely forgiven myself for these assumptions, which I remind myself are unbecomingly American. I try to take comfort in the language here, whose coupled letters offer a welcome contrast to my experience wandering the streets alone.

All posts tagged: Essay

To Abandon Paradise

Natal Promise, Natal Debt: On the Recent Poetry of Mara Pastor

Blaenavon

Welcome to the Future

Vanishing Point

We Lived in the Desert, Then

Blood and Every Beat

Fraternity

Current Obligations

Linnahall

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