SAND Issue 14 by SAND Journal

ISSUE 14

SAND Journal c/o Lyz Pfister Prinz-Georg-Straße 7 10827 Berlin Germany info@sandjournal.com www.sandjournal.com Connect with us for news and events: Facebook: SAND Journal Twitter: @sandjournal Instagram: @sandjournalberlin ISSN 2191-429X Published in Berlin Copyright © SAND Journal, 2016 Designed by Stephanie Hannon & Angelique Hering Printed by Solid Earth Cover image: SUPERSTAR I (Detail), 2015, by Tiphanie Chetara

SAND is Lyz Pfister

Simone Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donovan

Editor in Chief

Managing Editor

Florian Duijsens

Ashley Moore

Fiction Editor

Assistant Fiction Editor

Jake Schneider

Greg Nissan

Poetry Editor

Assistant Poetry Editor

Andrew Scheinman

Stephanie Hannon

Nonfiction Editor

Art Editor & Designer

Matthew Deery

Sara Bellini

Copy Editor

Distribution & Finance Manager

Rosie Flanagan

Nadirah Porter-Kasbati

Distribution & Finance Assistant

Jessica Miller

Elena Sergova

Events Manager

Assistant Events Manager

Anna Piazza

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Communications & Outreach

Verein Coordinator

Lyz Pfister

EDITOR’S NOTE Let’s just say it out loud. We fucked up. We’re pulling the rainforests out by the roots and watching whatever country we come from slowly self-implode as it shudders the shrapnel off over some other border. We’re turning to the glowing comfort of our smartphone screens and wondering why, when everyone else seems to be doing so well, we’re still just struggling to pay rent. These days, we’re having trouble finding the outlines. Where are we, when nowhere feels like home? Who are we, when we don’t have the words to describe ourselves? Somewhere, something went horribly wrong, and all we can do is keep up this desperate search for ground beneath our feet. As the narrator of Lucy Jones’s “Inclusion” so succinctly puts it: “This is going to kill us.” Inger Wold Lund’s poems, selected from her collection Nothing Happened, probe the borders of something we can’t quite grasp. They seem to say that if you compile enough moments of “nothing,” a picture of something will emerge. Less like direct translations, the Norwegian and English versions of these pieces are like reflections in a cracked mirror; a distortion echoed in Esther Yi’s vignettes, which explore an intimacy that can never breach another’s unknowable self. In “Partnership,” the narrator takes a mirror to bed instead: “With you, it’s me twenty times over, me twenty times miniaturized, me twenty times distorted.” 5

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Though mirrors promise an accurate outline of who we are, anyone who’s ever caught a glimpse of their own hollow eyes in the subway car’s glass knows the dangerous tales a reflection can tell. “She never recognizes any of the sounds when they say it back to her,” thinks the woman in “Patterns of Migration” (Azzouni) about Americans parroting her native Ukrainian. When her phone is stolen, she’s forced to question the meaning of home and how compelling a reason would have to be to make her move on. Similar questions arise in Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s “Wolves,” when the narrator meets another loner living with a wolf pack. Like an absurd mirage, the man is both reflection and foil for the narrator, whose ten years of paying dues to the WWF has secured his holiday of howling and hunting. “You’re just another tourist,” says one to the other. But aren’t we all just passing through? As much as SAND Issue 14 is about displacement and distortion, it’s also about trying to own those emotions by giving them shape. Sometimes, “the wild / feelings find no words” (Mayröcker, tr. Stonecipher, “Poem from études”), like we see in Melissa Henderson’s “nonverbal drawings,” which explore how we communicate when we do not have the words to do so. Nhã Thuyên’s persistent, weaving poem “a parade” takes just the opposite approach, using a cascade of words to wonder whether language can explain anything at all. She plays with slippery, connotation-laden Vietnamese pronouns, and translator Kaitlin Rees’s fascinating dive into their distinctions leaves us feeling disconcertingly unanchored. Something is wrong, but we can’t quite put our fingers on it – an idea captured beautifully by Claudia Hausfeld, whose tight collages integrate uncanny juxtapositions so seamlessly that the glitch is not immediately apparent. The same compactness appears in “[21810–21900]” (Grieco), where a kind of semi-transparent meaning emerges from a thick slough of language, whereas the collages’ uncanniness is echoed in “Eating Our Young” (May). As a group of brunching adults discuss today’s oversexualized children, provocative breakfast imagery throws our ideas of what childhood should be and what it has become into relief. There’s a discrepancy between what should be and what is, between who we are and how we present ourselves. In Mitchell Gauvin’s “The Constellation of James,” 6

Editor’s Note

James’s internal voice is distinctly at odds with his street-slang persona shaped by Northern Ontario’s ‘90s basketball subculture. And in Lizzie Roberts’s nonfiction piece “Worms,” a father’s attempts to share his love of gardening and nature with his daughter are marred by anger and violence. There are other violences in this issue: soldiers coming home with PTSD (Riekki, “Sonnet 13: Blood, the Blood, Not Blood, Then the Gates”), violence against black bodies (Brown, “Holy Bronx”), or abuse at the hands of parents or spouses (Kindig, “Boy,” Kovalyk, tr. Sherwood & Sherwood, “Julia”). In J.M. Parker’s “The Day Trip,” the daily violence in Jerusalem is less threatening than a father’s illness. When violence becomes too much, its victims seek mental escape. There’s the cool moon shining outside the window of the nighttime room, a painting hanging inside another person’s home. “When the haunting starts / everybody pretends they aren’t there” (Riekki). The body is fragile, but it’s something we all share, and Tiphanie Chetara’s vibrant, bold depictions of skeletons and viscera strip us bare. “We’re not bad people. We just come from a very bad place.” So says the speaker in one of Lund’s poems, repeating something from a television program, recycling, refracting the words. The more iterations things go through, the blurrier they become. But that’s not to say there’s never any clarity. In “Triangle” (Brown), a divorced dad gets to share an unexpected moment of tenderness with his daughter. Though the way forward is unclear, eventually they’ll get there, wherever “there” is. And what about us? How will we get where we’re going? Is the answer to “wait harder” (Booth, “This Broken-Waisted Waltz”)? Or should we try to glue the shattered mirror back together? Perhaps we’ll find a different kind of wholeness in the jagged reflection.

CONTENTS 11

Poems from Nothing Happened

[21801–21900]

Inger Wold Lund

Peter J. Grieco

Brussels, Beckett, Partnership

Triangle Larry Brown

Esther Yi 44 22

Worms

Sonnet 13: Blood, the Blood,

Lizzie Roberts

Not Blood, Then the Gates

Ron Riekki

Poems from Nothing Happened Inger Wold Lund

The Constellation of James Mitchell Gauvin 36

Boy Patrick Kindig

Julia Uršul’a Kovalyk // Translated by Julia & Peter Sherwood 65

Holy Bronx Michael Brown Jr.

Nonverbal Drawing No. 2 /

Superstar II /

Nonverbal Drawing No. 3

Humani Corporis Fabrica IV

Melissa Henderson

Tiphanie Chetara

a parade

The Day Trip

Nhã Thuyên // Translated by

J.M. Parker

Kaitlin Rees 77

Notes on a parade Kaitlin Rees

Gedicht aus études Friederike Mayröcker 100

Poem from études 80

Friederike Mayröcker // Translated by

Patterns of Migration

Donna Stonecipher

Jody Azzouni

Eating Our Young Jonathan May

102

Poems from Nothing Happened Inger Wold Lund 106

Inclusion 83

Wolves Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Lucy Jones 117

This Broken-Waisted Waltz Alexander Booth

Untitled / Untitled

118

Claudia Hausfeld

Contributors 9

Inger Wold Lund

Poems from Nothing

Happened

Ingenting skjedde, Flamme Forlag, 2015

A year ago. By a lake. While I was reading, a bird started singing next to me. I picked up my phone and recorded the sound. Then I played the recording. The bird tilted its head and listened. Then it flew away.

Fuglen vippet hodet til siden og lyttet. Så øy den sin vei. tok opp telefonen min og spilte inn lyden. Så spilte jeg av opptaket. Mens jeg leste, begynte en fugl å kvitre høyt ved siden av meg. Jeg For et år siden. Ved en innsjø. 11

Lund

A month ago. On a train. —You can serve sausages if they are small. The woman opposite me said. She was talking to her friend about the upcoming confirmation party of the friend’s daughter. —If they are large the skin becomes so prominent. You would not eat your own skin, you know. So you should not serve other animals’ skin either. She bit her arm to illustrate what she meant, repeating the words: —You would not eat your own skin.

Patrick Kindig

Boy

This boy is the boy

in every poem about

a boy. Yes, the one

with the sewing machine

and the river. Yes,

the one with the burning

hotel. Naturally

he is in every poem

about his fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old

shotgun. This means,

of course, the boy

has just learned

what is at the core

of love, which is,

of course, hate, or

some kind of

lighter fluid, or,

on good days, a

darker, wetter version

of July. His fingers

have in some way

been broken, his lips

cracked open

like a chestnut. The culprit

Boy

was every man

and every man

is his father

and every woman

is just a shadow

and a man

and his father. When

he lies awake in bed

at night, as he does

tonight and every night because

he is by nature in love

with the moon, he sometimes

rolls his name across

his tongue like

a cherry pit. Boy,

he says. Boy, boy. He looks

out the window as

he ties his fragile body

in a knot. His name

balloons outward in the room

and settles across

the floor like snow

as the stars outside stand in

for other stars.

Kaitlin Rees

Notes on a parade Pronouns in the preceding poem have been moved into clumsy English, an attempt to reveal the connotations beneath the words in Vietnamese. Such attempts succeed in their failure to translate the nuances of intimacy and (dis)respect, as well as acknowledgement of age, sex, social status, marital status, profession, and income that the following words can connote. Excerpt from the Vietnamese “tôi vẫn còn hão huyền đòi biến đổi thế giới từ những thay đổi tự tôi, nhỏ bé, lố bịch, quan hệ ngôi thứ nhất tôi với một ngôi thứ hai, tôi/ ta/mình/tao/tớ/mình/đằng này… —bạn/mình/cậu/mi/mày/người/ đằng ấy/ấy…, quan hệ tôi và ngôi thứ ba, tôi—hắn/gã/y/thị/ch(n àng/anh ấy/kẻ ấy/cô ấy/ả…, biến hóa bất tận, nguyên lý cốt lõi là tình yêu” “i am still a phantom calling for a changed world in the changes i make myself, tiny little ones, truly absurd, the relationship of a first person i with a second person, i/youme/my self/me fucker/i the close friend/melted selves/this dear here… —you friend/your self/you the close friend/y’all/you fucker/you person/that dear there/that one…, the relationship between me and the third person, i—he/joe schmoe/ johnjane doe/fair ma(ide)n /that elder he/that being/miss/the wench…, endless permutations, the core principle is love”

Rees

A glossary of Vietnamese pronouns First person tôi: I, as I am alone, used independently of one’s relationship to another, not a word with deep roots in Vietnamese but rather a “civilized” term of modernity introduced as a means to avoid pairings based on gender, status, age, etc. ta: I, as I am never alone in recognizing there are others who are always in my midst mình: I, as in the self of me that can melt into the self of you, used with special friends or romantic partners for whom no real distinction need be made between oneself and the other, can be used in the plural, as when looking in the mirror tao: I, as an old friend, perhaps from school days, who feels comfortable using a potentially rude and derogatory word knowing that it will not be misinterpreted tớ: I, as relaxed with a familiar friend đằng này: I, as I am with flirtatious intimacy, originating from a directional word meaning “road,” literally “this way” Second person bạn: you, as a friend, also used with a stranger who is not really a friend but someone who appears about the same age mình: you, as the self of you I see as the self of me (see above description for mình in first person, as this word blurs the first and second) cậu: you, as a familiar friend, paired with the first person tớ mi: you, as a familiar friend, used provincially in central Vietnam, not often heard in the north (Hanoi) mày: you, as a comfortable old friend who can use a potentially rude word without fear of misinterpretation, paired with tao 78

Notes on a parade

người: you, simultaneously personal and collective, you as a specific person and you as a concept of all other people, also meaning “human,” also meaning “body” đằng ấy: you, as you are with flirtatious intimacy, paired with đằng này, literally “that way” ấy: you, as someone, as anyone, in keeping some distance but friendly enough, can also be used with a stranger in an informal setting Third person hắn: he, a term originally gender neutral but in contemporary usage has come to denote male, used with some indifference/coldness in relation to the other gã: a guy, as in an everyday joe, can be casually derogatory, not showing much respect y: male, a general term to indicate male thị: female, a general term to indicate female ch(n)àng: an invented word combining chàng and nàng, respectively male and female third person pronouns of a literary and dreamy nature, originating in early modern romantic novels anh ấy: him; anh refers to a male who is, or could hypothetically be, of the same age as one’s older brother, in romantic relationships it is the most common term of address that the female uses for the male, ấy here is similar to second person ấy above, literally “that elder brother” kẻ ấy: being, one, individual, literally “that individual,” used to show some distance and unfamiliarity cô ấy: a young lady who is of an age that merits polite respect, literally “that miss,” can be used in a flirtatious way ả: she, archaic term for female, contemporary usage is disrespectful, as with prostitutes, or denoting negative feelings for female outlaws, as in news reports 79

Jody Azzouni

Patterns of Migration She’s from the Ukraine. From a big city in the Ukraine. So she wasn’t born yesterday. If people ask, she tells them her name. Her last name too, sometimes. (Амброх.) But she never recognizes any of the sounds when they say it back to her. Flirting with her, that’s what she thinks they might be trying to do. By mispronouncing her name. And smiling cutely at the same time.

Someone stole her cell phone. She’d just put it down for a moment on the counter,

looked away for only a moment. It was locked, so it was useless to the thief. She pointed that out in a text to the thief, imagining the phone vibrating in his pocket as he was going back home with his loot. She texted her phone, buzzed him the message: “I’ll pay you 100 dollars to give it back. Since you can’t do anything with it anyway.”

Its GPS located the phone near a street and cross street, no doubt the nearest

corner to wherever it was in his apartment he’d tossed the phone. Somewhere deep in Brooklyn where she’d never intended to go, not ever. I’ll be there on the corner from eleven to twelve noon, tomorrow, to see you. No cops, I haven’t called the cops. So it’s an easy $100, probably the easiest $100 you’ll ever make. (What she wrote was: “I’ll be there from 11-12 noon tom to see u. No cops. Easy $$$!!!”) Trying to be friendly about it: 80

Patterns of Migration

See what a good deal I’m offering you? Even though you strike me as something of a creep.

And she did what she promised to do. Even though she needed to be at work,

even though she lost even more money by taking time off to do this. And near the corner were a couple of garbage cans that were on fire. In broad daylight. With people walking by, just ignoring them. I thought that sort of thing only happened in movies, she thought to herself. (Я думала, що такі речі трапляються тільки в кіно, the words like images moving across a screen in her mind.)

No one ever came. “No, I’m not going home,” she tells her mother later that day.

On her boss’s phone, the one that she’s borrowed to make the call. “This isn’t enough of a reason to leave a place,” she tells her mother, who’s asking her to come home again, “not even this place.”

“There are possibly bedbugs in the movie theaters,” she tells her mother next,

and she wonders if she’s being a little spiteful by mentioning this. “That’s not a reason to leave either.” Worse things happen to people, after all, all the time. Even back home these worst things happen.

Claudia Hausfeld Opposite:

Untitled, 2011 Digital collage Overleaf:

Untitled, 2012 Digital collage

J.M. Parker

The Day Trip The air outside the car windows already has an early spring tone here: sun-warmed but not yet fully soft, still vaguely fragile. If this were home, there would be late forsythia, early daffodils. Instead, trees bright with lemons flash by. Above the fields, then suddenly quite close, white surveillance blimps float overhead, filming the sky. Heading south, they become more frequent, until Tobi’s father eventually stops pointing them out. “When the peace comes,” his father says, five, six times. “When the peace comes—” Then he coughs. Tobi’s father is narrating our trip. He has just seen a doctor. Something is wrong with his lungs. “When the peace comes, this field will be – this land will be—” he says again. Then he coughs. We pass through towns where every bus stop boasts its own concrete bomb shelter. “And there,” his father points, “is a kibbutz that took lots and lots of rockets these last eight years, during the—” then the cough. We drive and drive and look and look. Stopping at a persimmon tree, he jumps out to the road’s edge and begins gathering fallen fruit. I join him. They’re tiny mottled orange globes. He’s faster at collecting than I am. Soon he has two handfuls and presses them into my palms, cupping his own hands around mine, as if I were a child. 90

The Day Trip

“Coffee?” he asks. At a gas station, he comes out with three cups of espresso. “Just here,” he says, pointing beyond the parking lot, “Forty-thousand people were crossing this road every day, in both directions, before—” and his nose goes into his coffee cup. “This was the border crossing,” says Tobi, “the checkpoint.” Now, on a Saturday afternoon, there are tourists. Droves of them, parked below a mound of earth, the highest point on the plain, from which you can look out into Gaza. “There, on that hill,” his father points, “were twelve, fifteen rockets falling every day, during the—” He clears his throat. The events, the disturbance, the unrest, the incursion, the invasion, the war? Is he waiting for Tobi to finish his phrase? “Have you boys had lunch yet?” he asks. Tobi and I look at each other – somewhat guiltily, as his mother had fed us before we left – and I let Tobi answer no. The smack of a meat tenderizer on chicken flesh sounds at the counter behind us. “My own father ate lunch in this restaurant every day for fifteen years,” says his father, “because his office was just across the street.” Tobi’s mother had walked us along this same block of the city that morning, strolling back and forth on our way past the traveler’s insurance office and the money changer’s, the Russian quarter, the town’s first shopping center and a dried foods store, past the same restaurant she must have known his father would take us to later today. Each of them has taken us on their own tour of the old town’s same five blocks, each claiming their own stake, in our minds, of spaces central to the other’s life, tracing nebulous trails that overlap in the ways they must when two people live in the same space for decades yet no longer share its sites. Tobi’s father drops us off at his mother’s building after lunch, then sits in the car across the parking lot until we’ve reached the door. In the entry hall, Tobi presses the button for the elevator with an angry, sudden jerk, his lip curled. “He said his girlfriend was coming with us today. That’s why my mother didn’t come.” Through the doors, we watch his father’s car pull away slowly, as if it were moored to the earth like those surveillance blimps, tracing its route to his own apartment a few blocks away. When the peace comes, I think. 91

Parker

Five floors up, his mother’s living room is papered with yellow roses. In a corner behind the dining table sits a collection of vases with silk and plastic flowers, sunbleached, like everything, by the louvered windows on the apartment’s south side. The side one avoids when a siren sounds. After showing us how to use the coffee maker and the oven, she’d explained that. “When you hear the siren, you have five seconds, counting like this,” she’d said, showing us by slowly counting off the numbers on the fingers of one hand, “to get to the stairwell.” These days, apartments are less expensive on this side of the building. Outside, a sandy park stretches to the next building, then the next, low rows crowding the horizon so you wouldn’t guess the city has any real end.

— In the spirit of modern convenience, the city’s archeological center is designed for drivers. You pay through your car window at an entrance booth flanked by concrete planters, then, pressing the gas pedal, continue up the drive past freshly planted flower beds. In theory, it is possible to see the center’s entire collection of unearthed exhibits without leaving the seat of your car. A Roman forum’s bleached ruins lie spread across a freshly mown lawn as if dropped from the sky or pushed up through the green turf like teeth from gums. On nice days like today, Tobi’s mother muses, you would normally have difficulty finding a parking space, let alone a table in the picnic area. Today though, every table is deserted. Further on, the way is blocked by a security van. “The other side of the park is closed,” Tobi’s mother says, after speaking with a ranger. “Two rockets just fell over there. Only one went off. The police are coming to explode the other one.” In due course, a preemptory ambulance pulls slowly up beside our car, followed by a military jeep. Tobi’s mom parks, lets her seat back, lights a cigarette, and opens a magazine. “We’ll go for a walk,” Tobi says, “over to the Canaanite Gate.” “Come with us?” I ask his mother. “She’s already seen it,” says Tobi. 92

The Day Trip

“I’ll be in the car,” she says. We walk along the coast, taking photos of freshly planted flowers, and pause on the cliff ’s edge to gaze south at the power plant supplying electricity to Gaza. Tobi’s arms are already brown from two days of sun. As we kiss, the short pop of an exploded rocket sounds from the parking lot, and birds leave the trees, rising in concentric rings like water disturbed by a stone.

— By the time we arrive at the marina for lunch, the air has cooled. A dozen tiny sparrows balance on the railings above the water, watching our table with quick, anxious sideways glances. His mother sits facing the huge modern row of buildings behind us. “That’s where Tobi’s father lived after he moved out,” she says, distracting my attention from the sparrows when Tobi goes to the bathroom. “In one of those apartments,” she says, gesturing with a backhanded wave at once proud, vague, and dismissive. This is her job, I think: to show us the street where his father grew up, its shops, her apartment, the place where his father went after he left her apartment. The before, during, and after of an absence. And this is his father’s job, I think: to show up at random times in her narrative to prove his presence, that he still exists as more than an imaginary geography. The power plant supplying electricity to make our coffee and the complimentary biscuit now feeding sparrows is still visible down the coast at the far edge of the beach. Soon, as we drive home, its lights, like those all along the coast, will flick on, the sea-blue twilight folding over the shore like a luxurious quilt.

— In the city, people sit on white sofas in white living rooms with enormous black coffee tables and enormous black televisions, talking into telephones, playing video games, and watching scenes of fictional violence filmed in Los Angeles. Between calls or 93

Parker

during commercials, they pause to say things like, “Oh, I’m doing an MBA. I don’t know why I’m doing an MBA, but I’m doing it.” Laughs ensue. The next morning, Tobi’s father calls. He has followed us to Tel Aviv, after another appointment with his doctor. “It’s not asthma,” his father says, before hanging up. “I’ll tell you about it if you’ll meet me for dinner.” “He’s such a drama queen,” says Tobi. There’s a warm breeze between the wings of the mall that night, as Tobi’s sister comes out in gold jewelry to meet the three of us, flushed from an argument with the cell phone company over her bills. At dinner, I’m afraid to ask. I want to say the restaurant is elegant but ugly, but it’s not. It is like a beautiful country where nothing is ever quite right, except coffee and a cigarette. It’s a quiet meal. “Smoking is nice, but you pay a heavy price,” his father says from his seat, as Tobi and I return to the table for a second time, letting his sister out to smoke her own cigarette.

— On the streets of nighttime Jerusalem, faces glow fleetingly, Klimt-like. His father drives in for dinner and gives us a tour by car in the dark: here, a lookout point, here Tobi’s old flat, further south, down a road one shouldn’t travel at night, a checkpoint glowing dimly in the distance. A small taste of adventure. All roads lead to checkpoints, either simply because all roads do lead to checkpoints, or because his father likes to push at the boundaries of this world, to feel and share its sides and edges. Through the darkened car windows, the distance between the Old City and the West Bank is measured only by the streetlights flashing by between them, yellow pools marking space on the black road. In the morning over breakfast, a glimpse of a low green valley grazed by a herd of goats on the far side of the city wall tempts me with a sudden urge to climb the hill from its far side, and I walk off alone. The city wall sits atop a mound of yellow rubble glittering with smashed bottles. Walking up is like climbing a sand dune – it 94

The Day Trip

shifts under my feet, slowly accumulating bits of plastic, discarded car parts, torn bits of cloth as it rises. Up along the wall, raw spring branches are speckled with lone sparrows, and the musty odor of scraggly horses and ponies seeps out from the still, shadowed air between gaps in the sides of wooden sheds. Then a low-set window taped with plastic sheeting indicates a house, the bark of an angry dog tied to a stake echoes, and a group of boys coagulates on a rocky mound. “Hello, hello,” they cry in surprise, “money-money!” I’m thinking of Jesus, as one stone and then another pelts the leather back of my jacket. I walk on, entranced by a jolt of adrenaline, my eyes picking out safety in recognizable objects ahead: a paved street, a garage with a car pulling out, a woman wearing house slippers in a driveway, a crowd of Russians on a restaurant terrace. Tobi and I meet in the bazaar, walking on wordlessly together to the Dome of the Rock’s barbed wire (closed save for prayers, and neither of us prays), down to the Gethsemane garden, up to a Muslim cemetery behind the city wall where dried palms stretch over graves. Sunset. We were originally supposed to spend a few days at the Dead Sea with his father and the girlfriend, at a hotel where his father’s own mother, suffering from a skin disease, spent summers floating in curative water, but Tobi decides to make it a day trip. Perhaps simply to have more time alone for the two of us, perhaps to spare his mother jealousy. Early in the morning, Tobi’s father and his girlfriend are downstairs waiting in the hostel driveway. Half an hour later, the sun has warmed the asphalt as his father, seeking coffee, weaves us around a herd of goats blocking the entrance to a gas station. Then, suspended above the asphalt in our bubble of steel, glass, and rubber, the four of us descend together to the lowest place on Earth. Signs along the roadside mark our depth. “The sea is shrinking every year,” the girlfriend muses quietly, aligning our gaze with hers through the car window as it appears. You can see where it has receded, the shore lined with concentric rings of salt. Jordan, a soft blue haze across the water, is slowly growing closer. 95

Parker

At a seaside hotel we’ll buy swimsuits. But we won’t stay there. This is a day trip, after all. We won’t swim in the sea, either, but will float instead in a heated pool of filtered water drawn by a spa on the shore. “You have to be very careful to keep the water out of your eyes,” the girlfriend warns us as we follow both of them into the crowded pool. “The water is full of—” his father coughs. “It’s best just to keep your eyes closed,” says the girlfriend. So, eyes closed, surrounded by the spa’s other visitors in our own private circle, the four of us float, weightless legs curled beneath us as the glancing of our limbs guides us together.

CONTRIBUTORS Jody Azzouni was born in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches philosophy at Tufts University. His literary work is published (or forthcoming) in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Cimarron Review, and many other journals in the United States. His poetry has also been published in HQ and Purple Patch in England. This is his first 2D appearance in Berlin (which he is very excited about). He has published several books in philosophy, including Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Public Language Emerges and Persists (Oxford, 2013). Some of his fiction and poetry can be read at azzouni.com. Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in The Fabulist, *82 Review, Joyland, and Gigantic. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. He is a member of the non-ranked faculty collective bargaining team at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven. Alexander Booth is a writer and translator currently living in Berlin. His work has appeared in numerous international print and online journals. More information can be found at wordkunst.wordpress.com. Larry Brown lives in Brantford, Ontario. He is the author of the story collection Talk (Oberon Press, 2009) and recently completed his second collection, Satellite. He teaches writing workshops across Ontario. Michael Brown Jr. is a resident and native of the Bronx in New York City. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aberration Labyrinth, Bird’s Thumb, Yellow Chair Review, Euphony, and Visceral Brooklyn. Tiphanie Chetara is a painter born in France in 1983 who currently lives and works in Berlin. Based on impulsive lines and powerful colours, her expressionistic style combines different techniques and a variety of elements such as anatomical drawings, writings, and symbols, often taking inspiration from art history, philosophy, and 118

Contributors

contemporary culture. Her work has been exhibited in Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, and Berlin. tiphaniechetara.tumblr.com Mitchell Gauvin is a Toronto-born, Sudbury-raised writer and editor who has also spent time in Dublin and Montreal. His works have been featured in a variety of publications and festivals, and his debut novel, Vandal Confession, was released in fall 2015. He is currently a doctoral student in English at York University in Toronto. Peter J. Grieco is a native of Buffalo, New York and teaches writing at the University of Buffalo, where he wrote his dissertation on working-class poetry. He is a prolific songwriter and poet. His work has appeared recently in Bond Street Review, Tiger’s Eye, Right Hand Pointing, Poehemians, Paper Nautilus, Constellation, and Chiron Review. His chapbook RÉCEPTION DONNÉE CHEZ UN RICHE MARCHAND ARABE was published by Underground Books. “At the Musarium” is his series of semi-procedural verse based on 100-word sequences from word-frequency lists. Claudia Hausfeld is an artist from Reykjavík, Iceland. Born and raised in Berlin, she studied in Zurich, and lived in Copenhagen. Her work deals with the authenticity and simultaneous unreliability of the photographic image, with a focus on the relationship between knowledge, memory, and vision. Along with her own pictures, she utilises imagery from old books and postcards. She teaches photography at the Iceland Art Academy. claudiahausfeld.com Melissa Henderson is a Swedish/British artist based in Malmö, Sweden. She has exhibited extensively since graduating in 2009. Later works include “Together,” a largescale chandelier at Malmö Central Station, the sculpture “Say It Out Loud!,” and the public work “Ur bergets djup” made with Marje Taska. The installation “The Welfare State” and the book Prolog till den litterära vetenskapsteorin are recent collaborations with the feminist poet Hanna Hallgren. Henderson is interested in the history of ideas and subjects which are simultaneously personal and political. 119

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Lucy Jones is British and has lived in Berlin for way too long. She studied German and Film with W. G. Sebald and later did an MA in Applied Linguistics. She had several jobs before becoming a translator, mostly involving photography. Returning to her roots in literature, she founded a translators’ collective called Transfiction in 2008. She has translated Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Silke Scheuermann, Ronald M. Schernikau, and Brigitte Reimann, among others. She also writes book reviews (CULTurMAG, Words Without Borders) and hosts a reading event series called The Fiction Canteen for writers and translators in Berlin. Her current passion is Russian. transfiction.eu Patrick Kindig is a dual MFA/PhD candidate at Indiana University, where he studies American literature and writes poems. He’s the author of the micro-chapbook Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016), and his poems have recently appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Willow Springs, the minnesota review, Thrush, and other journals. Uršuľa Kovalyk is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and social worker. She was born in 1969 in Košice, eastern Slovakia, and currently lives in the capital, Bratislava. She has worked for a women’s non-profit focusing on women’s rights and currently works for the NGO Against the Current, which helps the homeless. She is the director of the Theatre With No Home, which features homeless and disabled actors. She has published plays, short stories, and novels, and was shortlisted for the Anasoft Litera 2014 for Krasojazdkyňa (Divadlo bez domova, 2013), which was recently translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood (The Equestrienne, Parthian Books). Inger Wold Lund, born in Bergen in 1983, is an artist and writer based in Oslo. Lund was educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts; Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm; and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main. She is the author of two books in her native Norwegian, published by Flamme Forlag. A collection of her stories in English has been published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She is currently writing a collection of erotic stories to be published by Cappelen Damm in the spring of 2017. She has had recent exhibitions in Berlin, Frankfurt, Naples, Bergen, and Seattle. Lund is a current recipient of a work grant from the Norwegian Arts Council. 120

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Jonathan May grew up in Zimbabwe as the child of missionaries. A queer writer, he lives and teaches in Memphis, Tennessee, where he uses poetry therapy to help people with eating disorders. His work has appeared in [PANK], Superstition Review, Duende, One, and Rock & Sling. He recently translated the play Träume (Dreams) by Günter Eich into English. Read more at memphisjon.wordpress.com. Friederike Mayröcker was born in Vienna in 1924. The author of numerous books of poetry, she is widely considered one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has published over eighty works since 1956, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children’s books. Her work has been honored with many prizes, including the Georg Büchner Prize and the Peter Huchel Prize, and has been translated into many languages. She lives in Vienna. Nhã Thuyên, born in 1986, writes, translates and edits books, and sometimes organizes literary events in Hanoi with friends. She has authored several books of poetry, short fiction, and some tiny books for children. Her most recent poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (từ thở, những người lạ) was published in Vietnamese (Nha Nam, Vietnam, 2015) and in English translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press, 2016). With Rees, she currently co-edits AJAR (www.ajarpress.com), a bilingual literary and art journal and press based in Hanoi: an online, printed space for poetic exchange. She is shaping a book of essays on marginalization in contemporary Vietnamese poetry in the Post-Renovation period. She also toys with poetry in other mediums. J.M. Parker moved between Seattle, Paris, Istanbul, and Berlin as a student, journalist, and translator for fifteen years before taking a post as assistant professor in Austria, where he teaches creative writing and American literature. His fiction has appeared in Frank, Gertrude, Segue, Intellectual Refuge, and Jonathan, among other journals, and in Lethe Press’s collection Best Gay Stories 2015. Kaitlin Rees, born in Wampsville, New York in 1985, has written one tiny book of poetry, Language Without Color (self-published, 2014), along with other poems and translations 121

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from the Vietnamese in AJAR, the bilingual literary and art journal and press that she co-edits in Hanoi with Nhã Thuyên. Her translations of Nhã Thuyên’s poetry have been published in a collection of three Vietnamese poets compiled by Vagabond Press (2013), as well as in a full-length collection, words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016), and online at Asymptote. Kaitlin’s ongoing poetic artwork of compiling fragments of an infinite dictionary was exhibited at Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, in 2015 and in the hutongs of Shanghai, China, in 2016. She is currently studying English as a fourth language. Ron Riekki’s books include U.P.: A Novel (nominated for the Sewanee Writers’ Series and Great Michigan Read), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Ed.) (2014 Michigan Notable Book awarded by the Library of Michigan, Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist, Midwest Book Award finalist, Foreword Book of the Year finalist, and Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Ed.)(2016 IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes – Best Regional Fiction and Next Generation Indie Book Award – Short Story finalist). Riekki has three books forthcoming with Michigan State University Press and McFarland. Lizzie Roberts was born in the Year of the Rat and grew up in Detroit. She studied fine art and design, and worked as an illustrator and graphic designer until the urge to write overwhelmed the allure of creating decorative crap for lifestyle magazines and corporate publications. She has lived in Berlin since 1994 and is currently writing a book about that time someone stole her bike, and other stuff. Favorite color: all of the above. Personal motto: this shoe doesn’t fit. In her spare time, she enjoys rearranging the furniture and nagging people to pick up their socks. Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and worked for Amnesty International in London for over twenty years. Peter Sherwood taught Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They are based in 122

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London and work as freelance translators from and into Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Polish. Their book-length translations include works by Balla, Béla Hamvas, Daniela Kapitáňová, Petra Procházková, Peter Krištúfek, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, Uršuľa Kovalyk, Noémi Szécsi, Antal Szerb, and Miklós Vámos. For more information, see juliaandpetersherwood.com. Donna Stonecipher is the author of four books of poems, most recently Model City (Shearsman, 2015). She translates from French and German, and lives in Berlin. Esther Yi is a writer in Providence, Rhode Island. Currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Brown University, she has written essays and reportage for Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Cinema Scope, Cineaste, and Fireflies. Whilst living in Berlin, she was the Nonfiction Editor and Copy Editor at SAND. She takes long walks in her room and lives online at estheryi.wordpress.com.

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Jody Azzouni Hugh Behm-Steinberg Alexander Booth Larry Brown Michael Brown Jr. Tiphanie Chetara Mitchell Gauvin Peter J. Grieco Claudia Hausfeld Melissa Henderson Lucy Jones Patrick Kindig

DE €8 / INT €10 SANDJOURNAL.COM

Uršuľa Kovalyk Inger Wold Lund Jonathan May Friederike Mayröcker Nhã Thuyên J.M. Parker Kaitlin Rees Ron Riekki Lizzie Roberts Julia & Peter Sherwood Donna Stonecipher Esther Yi