BATEAU 9.1 lit mag editor in chief Dan Mahoney managing editor Gaby Gordon-Fox editorial assistants Dominique Arsenault Rayna Joyce Grace Beck Sophie Joyce Aspen Budd Anna Parsons Sadie Cooley Danylo Shuvalov Makayla Corrigan Halle Smith Lucianna Edenlord Mihir Vikrant Kaulgud Jennifer Elliott
A Quick Note Letter from Guest Editor Maria Attanasio La Città Gli Abitanti L’Argilla Il Bosco Cani translated by Lisa Mullenneaux
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Jesús Aguado excerpt from lo que dices de mi translated by Electa Arenal/Beatrix Gates
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Iulia Militaru Experimentați, experimentați! translated by Claudia Serea
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Léopold Sédar Senghor Avant la nuit translated by France Hilbert
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San Juan de la Cruz Cántico translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington
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Hélène Sanguinetti JOUI 2 translated by Ann Cefola
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Joseph Levy Travel Diary, 1919 translated by Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer
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C.R. Resetarits
68
Federico García Lorca La Gallina translated by Goya van den Berg
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Ivonne Gordon Carrera Andrade Sincronía Picaporte Extraña habitante translated by Cindy Rinne
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Howie Good The Umbrella Revolution This Message Has No Body A Hazy Shade of Postcolonial Melancholia
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C. S. Carrier
82
Nadia Wolnisty Carrot Horchata Guava
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Dasein Korangar College Writing 141
90
Juan Carlos Reyes The Art of Leadership, No. 2
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Erin Carlyle Girls Who Ride Horses The Afterlife of Women
101
Bars and Stars
THE POET Selfie
Catherine Clinger The Will of Atropos
103
Beatrix Gates How to be carried in my shadow, March to April Neighbor
105
Gray Cox “At the Corner of the Plaza across from Worker’s Stadium”
108
Lauren Camp Echolocation
110
Christopher Brean Murray Zephyr
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Jennifer Sperry Steinorth SELF-PORTRAIT with PERENNIAL SHADE PISSED
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Michael Robins The Day After Yesterday Rabbit Beach Road
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Kevin Tosca Smoking Like a Nun’s Twat Three Guys In a Room
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Contributor’s Notes
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Maria Attanasio from, Nero barocco nero
(Le poesie le scrivo in cucina d’inverno tra terrorismo dissenso la crisi afgana. L’altura evaporata in nebbia la casa diretta verso l’ultima fermata. Le pignatte ancora sui fornelli il pendolo ipnotico tra scrittura e puzzo di bruciato.)
1
Attanasio
from, Black Baroque Black translated by Lisa Mullenneaux
(I write poetry in the kitchen in winter amidst terrorism dissent the Afghan crisis. The high ground lost in fog the house headed for the last stop. Pots still on the flame a hypnotic pendulum between writing and the smell of burning.)
Attanasio • Mullenneaux
2
San Juan de la Cruz Cántico 1 ¿AdÓnde te escondiste, Amado, y me dexaste con gemido? Como el ciervo huiste aviéndome herido; salí tras ti clamando y eras ydo. 2 Pastores, los que fuerdes allá por las majadas al otero, si por ventura vierdes aquél que yo más quiero, decilde que adolezco, peno y muero. 3 Buscando mis amores yré por esos montes y riberas; ni cogeré las flores, ni temeré las fieras, y passaré los fuertes y fronteras.
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San Juan de la Cruz
Songbook translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington
1 Where could my lover be? He’s left me cryin’ all alone. A buck lost round a tree, he’s cut me to the bone. Tell the leaves to find him, but he’s gone. 2 Hey shepherds, y’all who prance up and down these hills and dales: if you see by chance the one who fills my sails, tell him that I love him. I’m on a bed of nails. 3 I’m lookin’ for my lover. I’ll cross mountains. I’ll brave showers. I won’t take cover. I won’t pick flowers. I’ll jump walls and slip by towers.
San Juan de la Cruz • Ludington
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4 O bosques y espesuras plantadas por la mano del Amado. O prado de verduras de flores esmaltado, decid si por vosotros a passado. 5 Mil gracias derramando pasĂł por estos sotos con presura; y, yĂŠndolos mirando, con sola su figura vestidos los dexĂł de hermosura.
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San Juan de la Cruz
4 Listen up forest. Listen trees. I know my lover planted you. Hey grasses in the breeze and flowers bright with dew. Has my lover come on through? 5 He went by here just now, went spilling beauty on his way. We couldn’t say quite how (he didn’t stay to say), he drew new forest colors out of grey.
San Juan de la Cruz • Ludington
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Ivonne Gordon Carrera Andrade Sincronía La sincronía une el amor y la respiración del tiempo. La oscuridad y el camino con piedras disparejas hace tambalear cualquier mal paso. Piedras recogidas al lado del río, golpeadas por el susurro del agua, esculpidas por el roce de la arena. Piedras nobles y desiguales que respiran orgásmicamente. Así es la muerte repentina de las palabras mueren en una noche de amor. Es un asesinato lento, la única arma, el deseo de dos cuerpos que claman sincronía. Sin importar la falta de luz, o la desigualdad de las piedras. Es una muerte lenta. Se escapa desaforada sin palabras por un subterráneo de ternura. Es el reflejo suspendido sin sombra, sÓlo existe el albor de dos cuerpos, dos piedras que lánguidamente padecen.
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Carrera Andrade
Synchronicity translated by Cindy Rinne
The synchronicity links love and a quick breath of time. Darkness and the erratic pathway of marble stones, means a misstep causes us to stumble. Stones collected by the river, worn by the water’s whisper, sculpted by erosion of sand. Noble, uneven stones breathe orgasmically. Still, the sudden death of words die in the night while we make love. It is a slow death, our one weapon, the desire of two bodies which cry out synchronicity. Lovers oblivious to the loss of light or the inequality of stones. It is a slow passing. It escapes without words by only a deep tenderness. It is a reflection, pictured in the shadows, saved in the blush of dawn – two bodies, two stones that languidly perish.
Carrera Andrade • Rinne
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103
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Howie Good The Umbrella Revolution A body wrapped in a blue tarp was laid out on the lawn of a house. Mourners sat around it after the ambulances left and sang dirty songs, a fleeting contagion of emotion spreading from one person to another. There’s no point in pretending these things didn’t happen. On that sunny afternoon a man without a shadow appeared to be watching from under an open umbrella. It’s considered a bad omen when the umbrella in a dream is open. Hey! No problem! Van Gogh painted a picture of underbrush full of sun and life just hours before he committed suicide.
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Good
Nadia Wolnisty from, JUICE Carrot Now is a good time to talk to you about carrot juice. The flavor is so complex. Like the first bite of an apple or caramel mixed with stew. Sweet in a way that feels odd, although sweetness in carrot is not unprecedented, such as carrots broiled with brown sugar or carrot cake. I regard it with trepidation. The flavor defies a solid description. Moreover, drinking carrot juice feels so deliberate and kind a thing to do to one’s body. I find it more natural and befitting when something grotesque happens to mine. Always, but especially after my body betrayed me while being raped or ended a life that never was. I enjoy getting zits the size of hotels on my shoulders. When my friend got an eye-infection, I got jealous. A boy who used to flirt with me told me that if I were the size I am now when I was in college, he would have never paid attention to me.
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Wolnisty
I wished I had eaten nothing but cake for years before I had the misfortune of meeting him. My boyfriend likes to go on walks with me. Doing this feels kind to him, and I can forget about my body, except for my hand in his. The leaves are gathering on the sidewalks, and one is all the way caramel, except for a splash of orange in the center. Juice.
Wolnisty
86
Rabbit Beach Road
Relentless as a multiplying thought, miracle how the lake’s rhythm confesses to the air its riddle, pulsing, wild. After the argument no sunrise cures the sky, overcast & below it (according to the eye) no island. My science knows better, counters what limping light lands on the retina’s rod, the shifting cones blind to the indifferent, outstretched hold unmade by the couch for this husband. Lucky, my skin doesn’t heed the driven mosquitoes so much as my ear, their buzzing like an arrow full of yesterday with its stray seeds & stone constellated over the sand & into the kitchen, how a crane fly plays so persuasively dead inside the bed of cauliflower leaves. I pile it snug in the pocket of a sweatshirt, the hours I’d picture my father here, join him in ordinary deference to hummingbird & roadside deer, hymn for the eagle bald, sublime, dwindling past the coastal pines. I return to myself dazed &, while I can, to the shallows where in fact
Robins 118
marbled rocks again outnumber the lake fish flickering the shore. The waves roll into breath, six then seven deep after the circle of my iris dilates & slips, determines the wind & water entangled, unto itself the boundary circled like human needfulness, apology & its mercy, day after day where the faithful swell renews no matter, for no better reason than to ask each body, ours & willingly, to bound right in.
119 Robins