Two Thirds North 2014 by Adnan Mahmutovic

in this issue

KEVIN BARRY KATE NORTH JOHANNES ANYURU

TWO THIRDS NORTH

2014

TWO THIRDS NORTH 2014

editors

artistic editor publisher

associate editors

Paul Schreiber, Adnan Mahmutović Armin Osmančević Department of English, Stockholm University Najlaa Eltom, Lee Neary, Ralph Martin Fleischer, Asma Hamdan, Christian Gräslund, Karl-Johan Skagerström, Victoria Gomez, Fridrik Solnes Jonsson, Dag Andersson, Ina Karkani, Ludwig Karlsson, Francesco Masala, Sorin Masifi, Karin Mattisson, Maria Mrozewska, Anna Poyhonen, Åsa Samuelsson, Sally Anderson

ISSN 2001-8452 (Print) ISSN 2001-8460 (Online) Cover art and p. 54 by Patrik Widmark. Photographs on p. 8, 26, and 84 by Meho Mahmutović. Photos of Kevin Barry by Paul McVeigh.

CONTENTS Editor’s Foreword, Paul Schreiber

OUT OF PLACE Kattfot och blå Viol, Maria Freij Straight Outta Silver Lake, Pernilla Jansson Combe Down Tunnel, Andy Turner The Bullet, Rafiki Ubaldo Blueberry Picking, Allen Qing Yuan If I had gone to church, Tom Boswell

10 12 13 16 24 25

OUT OF TIME Target Treatment, Kate North Prognosis, Sarah Vallance Come Marvel at the Catasquaphonous Carnival of Dick Clark’s Rootin’-Tootin’ New Year’s Eve John F. Buckley and Martin Ott Before Angels, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán Long Way Down, Maria Freij Reading Material, Stephen Lynch

28 30 42 44 46 50

tr anslations from Time: a song about the walls of Troy, Johannes Anyuru

The Hotel, Zou You Horary Chart, Zou You The Skull, Zhu Jian The Horror of a Bookstore Owner, Zhu Jian

60 62 64 64

BLOODLINES AND WATERLINES salt lake sisters, Ha Kiet Chau To this woman who was supposed to be a random woman, Ieva Krivickaite Aerial Pas de Deux, Francine Rubin Theme, Douglas Cole from The Architect, Mikael Lopez Nonsensical, John Sibley Williams Learning Transparency, John Sibley Williams Catalogue of Lessons, Josefin Ullberg Enhanced Care Unit, Kate North

70 72 74 75 76 78 79 80 82

NATURAL CONFRONTATIONS Vision Science, Jody Azzouni Natural Confrontations, Changming Yuan Toad Cactus, Sarah Ann Winn The Mermaid Behind the Glass, John F. Buckley and Martin Ott Snowy Stanzas, Changming Yuan Natural Disasters, Josefin Ullberg

86 98 100 101 102 104

The Man with All the Answers (a comic), Mikael Lopez and Olle Forsslรถf

107

IN FOCUS: KEVIN BARRY Breakfast Wine

117

Interview with Kevin Barry, Paul McVeigh

133

Link din (a comic), Rae Joyce

149

Editor’s Foreword “I’m open to the fates. It’s myself and the four winds,” says Mr. Kelliher, the bartender in Kevin Barry’s “Breakfast Wine,” from this year’s Two Thirds North. And here we are in Stockholm, the four winds bearing to us voices of poets and story writers, translators and comic artists from China, Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, Hong Kong, Rwanda, the UK, the US, New Zealand, and Sweden. Many of these writers, like our editorial staff, have been open to the fates, led or forced across borders to places not of their origin. And this quality gives to Two Thirds North the transnational tone we seek to receive, like a delicate radio signal, and then broadcast to the world. Yet notions of place and time often bring to the writer a sense of displacement and lostness in time. A number of this year’s submissions have been ruthlessly gathered under the thematic rubrics of Out of Place, and Out of Time. The first segment, Out of place may suggest anything from a longing for an abandoned country, to the disjointedness of a family torn by an ethnic civil war, or simply the pleasure of being in one place instead of another. Out of time brings us closer to the final moments of a person’s life, to the multiple layers of time that remain in a place violently covered by new cultures, or a post-modern compressions of all cultural times in one, or just the desire to escape from the idling of time in a waiting room. This year we have introduced poetry translations and have submissions from China and Sweden. Translation is at the heart of writing, the translating of feelings and ideas to words.

But we are also interested in the cultural translations that come with the poetic word, which we find in the multi-ethnic poetry of Johannes Anyuru. Bloodlines and Waterlines draws together works which explore the threads that hold generations or siblings together, or lines of desire between people, or lines of the heritage of violence between generations. In some of the works water simply runs as an image or metaphor, a new way of seeing. We borrow the title Natural Confrontations from Changming Yuan’s poem as an inroad into the section of works where nature reveals to us internal conflicts, the vulnerability of nature itself, or the confrontations that arise because of human nature. For the first time we have comics. The amazing team of the writer Mikael Lopez and the artist Olle Forsslöf gives us that which all the best comics do, the merge of the adult and the child, depth vibrating with playfulness. This year we continue to put a writer In Focus in an interview with Kevin Barry, the Irish novelist and short-story writer. We include his story “Breakfast Wine” from his collection There Are Little Kingdoms, which Barry himself believes is his best vintage. The writer remains in focus in Rae Joyce’s “Link Din,” a comic on the writer’s condition in the blogosphere, and how nice it might be to be “connected” to God, and indeed open to the fates and the four winds of world literature. Paul Schreiber

Out of place

Kattfot och blĂĽ Viol Maria Freij

It is not healthy for the heart to keep writing these poems: someone should really tell me to stop; what is the use of pine trees and freezing birds in a country where everything is ablaze with colour and heat? None, I say, but they seem to like it, this otherness, this idea that they stay with you, the sunsets and autumn storms, the skerries and the moonlight over the lingonberry leaves, thick and rain-slick in the dark. Gullviva, mandelblom in the morning dew, cobwebs tying stems and leaves together. It is not healthy for the little heart to keep walking these pathsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; they think they know you now, and for some reason they want more: more pine trees, they say, more blood. Amazing, they say, how it stays with you, just like that accent, which we cannot quite pin down, how it does not leave you, after all these years. 10

I am telling you it doesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; these are just words: Tussilago, vitsippa, krokus. And no one picks these flowers for my mother now that I do not.

Straight Outta Silver Lake Pernilla Jansson

The day unfolded like a tightly rolled yoga mat Rising at dawn he juggles coffee, Chekhov and alternate tunings while in Warrior Pose He carries an old Waltham watch in his pocket Whether out of derision or as a nod to Lincoln he always seemed to be running four minutes late He self-defines as “a creative” has a post-ironic passion for modernist architecture and a knack for guessing people’s middle names He takes his fixed-gear cruiser through Echo Park Tries to cut through a posse of Coachella poseurs but faceplants the bottom of the drained lake There’s a joke there somewhere beneath the surface but someone beat him to the punchline

Combe Down Tunnel Andy Turner

Combe Down Tunnel is 1,670 metres long, and unventilated. Lighting operates from 5am – 11pm.

* I am eight-hundred metres in when the lights come on ahead. Half the tunnel illuminated – half in dark. Dawn, it stumbles over the hill above and snags its coat on the crest. Hanging there it soaks through the ground until the line falls here. The event horizon. I stand on the edge of a black-hole, where both infinity and oblivion pause to give us a moment. In that moment they come: voices of the deaf, deaf-blind, pre-lingual, post-trauma; clients, patients, residents; speak, cluck, growl. Once I lay in an MRI machine, the magnetic pulse beat its apocalyptic drum. The voice of the nurse came, ‘Lay still, doing well’, and I could only answer, ‘Yes.’ The voices assemble, calling back to when understanding was on both sides, or mourning that their language never had a correspondent. The tunnel walls answer ‘yes’ to everything. * The birds knew it was coming again – dawn, the word spread through them faster than the earth can turn. In silhouette 13

they rushed tree to tree – cursors, chasing behind the spidery font of twigs.

I went to simulate blindness, to gaze into the dark.

The flap of wings bothered leaves, claws scratched for purchase on bark – creaks from branches that seemed the-place-to-be. The sound of my own steps stretched, the twang of thick rubber bands snapped in mid-air.

I went to be deaf, to stand still, hold my breath, listen in vain.

To leave what excites the senses behind, to go where there is no light, or sound, unless you make it. *

I wander into partial darkness. The blue-black of engineer’s brick shines and dull mortar’s squeezed from the gaps between, imitating moss in the curve of the roof, walls and buttresses that lean back. Dark completes itself in fifty yards. I feel my pupils expand, the aperture opening to strive for light as I squint into the black. Deep breaths of catacomb damp and church vault must inhaled, breathing like a beginner. I imagine a vanishing point so I might attempt to focus; it jumps with each tiny step, a camera flash blinking away.

So I close my eyes, stretch out my arms, shuffle forward, feet barely in front of each other; I whisper to them all, ‘I reach out to you, don’t reach out to me.’

The Bullet R afiki Ubaldo

ather died the other day at lunchtime. Shot in the head. He walked towards the militiaman and whispered something. Then he took a step back and spat in the militiaman’s face and screamed something I did not hear well. The militiaman stared at him for a moment, raised his riffle and two shots rang out. Two. Twice. In the head. Father fell right there, in the playground. I wonder what Father said to the militiaman. Later, some old men, old like my father, went over to the militiaman and said, “Shoot us too. Shoot us, please!” One offered money. Others begged. The militiaman stood right there, silent, in front of my father’s body, observing the old men lining up one by one, begging him to shoot them. “You can have my two daughters tonight if you shoot me,” one old man said to the militiaman. “Stupid old goose. What do you take me for?” The old man said nothing. The militiaman stared at him. The old man looked down. The militiaman said, “You very well know I could sleep with them as often as I want. I don’t need your permission.” The old man’s eyes were red. He must have been crying. His eyes were not wet though. And I did not hear him crying. Rwandan men do not cry. Only women and children can. Another old man stood in front of the militiaman, their fat

bellies almost touching each other. The old man said, “So, did Vincent say that you look like a dog? That your mother must have seen many men in her life?” The militiaman punched him. The old man fell next to my father’s body. He looked up again and said, “He called you a dog, didn’t he? Because you are one filthy dog.” “Mzee,” the militiaman leaned over and whispered. “The rules have not changed. We only use the machetes.” And then he shot in the air. “There you got your bullet, stupid old men. Are you happy now?” He laughed. “Now, get out of my sight!” They all left, one by one, and went back to their rooms. They closed the doors first, and then curtains. Silence fell over the whole place. Nothing living was moving. The wind stopped blowing. The playground was empty. Where did all the refugees go? And then a voice came from the West, “Hey, you. Yes you boy. Get out of here.” It was the militiaman. He was still there, planted in the same spot, in front of my father’s dead body. I was in the very same position as I was when Father got shot. My hands released something that fell on the ground. It hit a stone and sounded. It was the small casserole bowl containing Father’s lunch. I felt like coming back to my senses. I stared at my father lie on the ground and then at the militiaman standing there with his weapon and a sneer on his face. Frightened, I ran off. I went home and sat there. I do not know what I did. I stared. I stared at nothing. At first, tears came slowly. Then I started sobbing. But I had to find Mother to tell her what happened. I wiped my tears and was ready to go out. Then I heard Mother’s voice, “Was the bullet for him?” I said nothing. “I know it was for him, wasn’t it? I don’t see the bag and the casserole bowl. That’s how I know.” Since the day we came here, it has been a huge operation

to bring lunch to Father. He stayed in the part of the refugee camp reserved for men. I stayed in the part reserved for women and children. We never met as a family. Fathers rarely saw their children. Wives never saw their husbands. But Father needed his lunch. He had a terrible sickness in his stomach and he always had to have a special lunch. Mother cooked it as she always did at home in the village. But now we were in a refugee camp. Things changed. I’d watch Mother’s face while she cooked Father’s lunch. She was always lost in thinking or something. I guess she wondered if and when all the pain would end. Or maybe she was thinking about the day we’d die. I am not sure. I never asked her. I’ve thought about this a lot. So, every lunch hour, I had to go through the big kitchen of the refugee camp. It was embarrassing. All the cooks gave me looks that seemed to tell me: “You special boy, with a special lunch to a special father.” After all the looks, I proceeded behind what used to be a big library, walked across the huge and dusty playground, and then through the smell of damaged toilets, and all the way to the other end by the small old chapel, where Father and other men like him were housed in this refugee camp, this camp that had been, not so long ago, a school. While eating his lunch, Father and I used to talk. He was boring. He kept asking me if we’d slept well. I’d say, “Yes.” Then he’d ask me how Mother was doing. And I’d say, “She’s fine.” I never asked him anything. Every time I went back, Mother would ask the same kind of questions. “How is your father? Did he enjoy his lunch? Did he say something about me?” One day Father said he missed being with us, the children.

“I miss your mother too,” he said. When I told Mother, she smiled. It felt very good. The smile. It was nice. Now, as I told her what happened to Father, she listened, in silence. Then she looked at me and said, “Now you are a man. Do not cry again.” She leaned over me and started to whisper. “Now listen to me carefully. Whatever it is that you saw, you are not going to tell your brothers and sisters. We will tell them your father was kidnapped last night and we do not know what happened to him.” “But Mother,” I raised my voice. “Keep your mouth shut and listen to me.” “But you know it was his 50th birthday. As I prepared to take lunch to him, everyone asked me to wish him a good day. Everyone! You included. What about that? And the nice clothes you ironed and thought he should have on him to feel good on his birthday? What am I going to say? What about the small casserole bowl?” “Listen to me. You will say nothing. What you saw is now between you, your father and me. I don’t care what you think. I am telling you, you will say nothing.” “What am I going to say?” She paused for a moment, then looked at me. “Wait here.” She took the key, closed the door behind her, and left. I stayed there determined not to cry again. When she came back she told me that everything was taken care of. “This story is over. You will not need to tell it again.” “Why?” “Mugabo, do not be stupid. You know everyone will ask you how you know this.” I stared at her. “Don’t you realize that everyone who gets caught by the militia prays that they not hacked them to death like a cow? People here pray for the bullet. Your father got lucky. I am

happy for him. But the way he died is a curse for us. Had he disappeared like other men, we would have learnt one morning that he is gone. Dead like every other man we hear about all the time. We should hear him tonight like we hear all those others who are butchered. I almost sobbed, but I managed to be a man she told me to be. Maybe she should have told me to be a woman, like her. She didn’t cry. She said, “We should be spending those terrible hours of the night figuring out whether or not we recognise his voice, like other families are doing every night. We should be like everyone else. But now everyone is going to know your father got the bullet. We’ll be isolated. I don’t want this whole camp to talk about us. So, let us keep a lid on this story and people will understand that we know how lucky we’ve been. I hope that our silence will help people understand we sympathise with their own losses. I wish every widow understands that every single man we lose every night, every man’s voice we hear in the night is also my man.” She stroked my shoulder. “But let’s face reality. We are going to be seen at as the lucky ones. Remember your aunties telling me how lucky I was I still had a husband. As if your father was not their husbands’ brother. Now they will say that I was lucky he was shot. They’ll always nag about it. Do you see why you have to keep your mouth shut?” I sat there, listening to her. I do not know if I was sad. I don’t know for sure. But I knew that what Mother said was important for her and I promised her to keep my mouth shut. Yes. Shut. Father is dead. I will never see him again. I do not know what happened to his body. And I don’t know what Mother said to my brothers and sisters. I have to wait before I can ask. But I am a man now. And Rwandan men do not cry. I wonder

if Mother will cry. They say Rwandan women cry, but she is no longer a woman. I do not know what Rwandan widows do.

The altar of the former Catholic church in Nyamata, Rwanda. It now serves as a Genocide Memorial Museum in memory of the Tutsi who had sought refuge there but ended up losing their lives. Photo courtesy of r afiki ubaldo, 2010

Blueberry Picking Allen Qing Yuan

the young urban lad dons a snap-back hat rather than straw on his head and spits city slur rather than hang wheat from his lips he races through the whips and slap of the bushes still unable to realize this is far from a true farm a piece of land measured for markets growth of work bounded by its own growths the lad can only fathom this simplicity of picking fruit with no idea, this entirety was a fruit of labour, love, and desperation he sweats from picking rather than planting and within moments this thrill of the hunt is over and the young urban lad crosses back over where he feels safe, where he hears car whizzing instead of trees whistling while eating blueberries

If I had gone to church Tom Boswell

this Sunday morning, I would not have heard Allen reciting Howl and Kaddish on the radio, would not have seen the silky white cat slink through the shrubs stalking God-knows-what, would not have recalled how he sat cross-legged on the bare-wood living room floor of our flat in Milwaukee playing the harmonium, how he chuckled when I put Cat Stevens on the turntable – at the part where Mary dropped her pants by the sand and let a parson come and take her hand – would not have seen the hummingbird hover two feet in front of my face as I sat on the garden swing nor smelled the honeysuckle, would not have savored the dark roast coffee so exquisite with the huckleberry buckle baked last night with berries from the garden, nor heard the sandhill cranes chortling high in the sky above. What would I have done in church except pretend – in deference to all those Sunday seekers – to be nearer there than here to what is all around me, spread out for those with eyes to see, like a holy banquet upon the earth, this kingdom coming now right now this Sunday morning.

out of time

Target Treatment K ate North

I had not touched you before, you were sat on the corner of your fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bed, tear-clogged and dumb, shaking head. When you saw me you lied a smile, shifted your weight then waved. The sudden retreat before us, grasping, grasping and clutching the air. You had never seen anyone look this old, never heard the nursery gurgle nor tried to match the distanced stare.

If you want him to eat feed him. The decline is rapid. We can tell you more after the weekend. He has been hiding food. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have his records. 28

You pierced the foil lid and pushed down, unsure of the routine. Da, Da, Dad, good, good, good. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ll call Mam to bring you some more. In the lift we shook our heads, then in the A&E cul-de-sac we stood, we sighed, we hugged. It was hot and I can still recall the damp of your neck, your back.

Prognosis Sar ah Vallance 1994

esterday I nearly died. We were out playing with my friend Paul’s 4WD buggy. It’s new and he couldn’t wait to show me. That’s why I’m here, in Crookwell, a three and a half hour drive south of Sydney. With me on my weekend adventure are my dogs, George and Bess—city slickers who love nothing more than to pretend they are country dogs, riding around in flatbed trucks, tearing after stray sheep, hanging with the farm dogs, which sniff at them with scorn. Outside it’s forty degrees. The Australian sun has ripped open the earth below. Weather ripe for bushfires. Inside it’s even hotter. I came to visit Paul and Lorna on their farm and to see Paul’s new buggy. It’s red and black with monstrous tyres, and looks like either a lot of fun or a death trap. I hopped on behind and let Paul drive me around the paddocks before demanding it was my turn. He lifted himself off, stood to one side, and told me to drive up the side of the mountain. I did. Paul ran behind me, trying to keep pace with his new toy. Near the top I grew bored and decided to change course. I turned left. “Shit! No!” Paul shouted, appearing out of nowhere, hurling himself in front of the buggy to keep it upright and stop it rolling down the side of the mountain, with me on top of it. “Fuck! You can only go up or down on a mountain. It can roll!” “Calm down,” I said. “It nearly killed you!” he said, folding himself onto a rock, his head between his hands. 30

I waited for him to get up, thinking about the reality of being killed by a rolling buggy. It scared me less than I thought. It was not quite a year since my father died. I would never get over my father’s death. I knew it at the time and I was right. After 30 years of life I was happy to go anytime. Moments later, Paul pulled himself up, threw his leg over the side of the buggy, patted the seat behind him which was officially now my seat—in less than ten minutes I had managed to lose all driving privileges—and drove us back to the house.

aul and I met in Corrective Services. I was his boss. We spent our days visiting every prison in New South Wales. Paul was my bodyguard, the one who shoved aside the inmates who rubbed themselves against me as we walked through the kitchens and the dining areas. After we’d been friends for a couple of years, Paul told me his mother was doing time in Mulawa Women’s Prison. Fraud. She had done something dodgy with the accounts at one of his father’s car yards. Paul felt funny visiting, he said. All the staff knew him as the Policy Adviser to the Minister for Corrective Services. Yet his mother was inside. Today I ask to ride Paul’s horse. A light has switched on inside my brain about the buggy. It wants to kill me. And while that might solve certain issues, I decide the buggy is best avoided. I have no such concerns about Mac. Mac is a big horse—sixteen hands at least—and Paul says he’s docile. “You’ll be lucky to get him to do much more than eat,” he says. That’s ok, I answer. Paul goes off to the barn to get a saddle and bridle and I acquaint myself with Mac. I have an apple in my pocket Mac swipes without me realizing it. “Help yourself,” I say when I notice him eating it. I rub his muzzle. He likes me. Why would he not? I have a way with animals. Mac waits placidly while Paul saddles him up. It takes me

a couple of goes to mount him. He’s big and it’s been at least a decade since I rode a horse. At lunch I had a couple of glasses of chardonnay, which may have hampered my reflexes slightly. I try to count the times I have even been on a horse. Five. In thirty years. Finally, after an undignified mount, I find myself on top of Mac. He takes a moment to study the scenery, scoping the place, seeing what his options are. He ambles towards a thick clump of dried grass next to a fence post. I pat his neck, as if to say, take your time Mac. Kick his sides, Paul says. I don’t. I don’t get time. Mac is galloping. Towards a fence. He leaps the fence. It is the first time I have jumped anything on a horse. It is exhilarating. And another fence. I feel alive, for the first time in ages. I have no clue what to do other than lean forward and hold on. We are flying. I have galloped on horses before but Mac is going faster than any of them. He will have to stop sometime, I tell myself. We head down a hill. This is not good. Leaning forward I clutch at the hairs on Mac’s neck. Should I lean forward or backwards? Gravity says backwards. Shocked by the pace we are moving and the steep drop below me, I feel fear for the first time. There is a chance this will end badly. The hill is rocky and Mac is not watching his footing. He may slip and break a leg. A horse with a broken leg needs to be destroyed. It will be my fault. I should have left him alone in his paddock. I grip the reins tightly and tell him to stop. Or at least to slow down. He takes my words as a sign to speed up. Then he stops. Suddenly. He digs his feet into the ground and braces himself. I am flying. Alone, this time. I soar over Mac’s head and somersault through the air. Time is suspended. I savour the moment. I am a diver, with no water below me. In dreams as a child I flew. This is different. I cannot control the speed, the direction, the altitude. It’s almost more fun. Except that I will 32

land. And I have no time to plan my landing. I will almost certainly break an arm. An arm. That’s ok, although I won’t be able to drive home. Never mind. Paul will drive me. And I’ll get scratched. No way to avoid that. The earth is hard and covered with rocks, and between the rocks are thickets. Those are my last thoughts as a person with a healthy, normal functioning brain. The sound my skull makes as it hits a rock is like no sound I have heard before. It’s an assault. One part crack, one part slosh, one part thump. My brain rattles inside my skull.

come to, and notice Paul is leaning over me, speaking. Who is he talking to, I wonder, before realizing he is talking to me. Mac nuzzles my feet apologetically. “I got a bit carried away” he seems to say, although it could just as easily be saying, “Fool!” I lie on my back and look at the sky, thinking, Horses are not like dogs. The clouds pass overhead. It never occurs to me to move my legs. “You’ve got a scratch down your arm,” Paul says. I look at my arm. A cut runs from my elbow down to my wrist. “Take it easy. No rush to get up. Where did you land?” I point to the back of my head. “Here.” “Let me have a look.” He peers at my scalp and says, “Not even a mark.” I stand up and walk slowly back to the house. As soon as I am upright I develop a headache. The kind that feels like someone has split open my head from behind with an axe. A lump forms on the back of my head. I can feel it. It never occurs to me that life will be different from this moment on. I drive back to Sydney that afternoon. Three and a half hours on the road. I’m fine, I tell myself as I tear along the freeway in between semi-trailers and cars driven by old people. And I believe it to be true. 33

Home, I ring my mother. I got thrown off a horse, I tell her. “No, darling, you fell.” “I did not fall.” “Horses don’t throw people off, darling. People fall.” “No, this one threw me. Catapulted me.” “Look it doesn’t matter. Pour yourself a strong Gin and Tonic. You’ll be fine. I fell off countless horses countless times, and look at me! Anyway Enid is here so I can’t talk now.” Enid is a distant aunt I don’t much care for. I hang up and pour myself a strong drink. Drinking is inadvisable after a head injury, but I won’t know that until years later when a doctor tells me. The next morning I wake as usual to find George’s muzzle in my side, reminding me it is time for a walk. We go to the park. Home, I feed the dogs. I open the fridge and am surprised to find the reading lamp from my study lying on its side next to a jar of goats cheese. I remove the reading lamp from the fridge and place it on the sink, next to the remnants of a square of butter, a block of parmesan cheese, a jar of jam, a tub of olives and a pint of milk. Why are these things on the sink? It dawns on me that they have been moved from the fridge to make way for the desk lamp. Confused, I notice the toaster is missing. I have been burgled. I race upstairs and look in the top drawer of my dresser for my grandmother’s sapphire bracelet. It is sitting as always in its blue velvet box. I race downstairs and check the living room. The TV and video player are still there. All that appears to be missing is the toaster. I check the doors and the windows. There is no sign that anyone has entered my house. I pack the things left out overnight back inside the fridge. I open the freezer. Inside I find the toaster. Covered in frost and icicles. I look at George and Bess. “Did you do this?” They look at me guiltily. I’m not convinced. Bess is the kind of dog who would confess to anything. I remove the toaster from the fridge and set it in the dish rack to thaw. I feed the dogs, and decide 34

to buy myself breakfast at the ferry on the way to work. I do not use the toaster for fear of electrocuting myself.

t work, I enter my office and set down my bag. It is 7.45 am. I am fifteen minutes late. I bend underneath my desk and turn on the switch to my hard drive and wait for my computer to turn itself on. Email has just been invented. We can send messages to anyone who works in our organization. The technology is incredible. The IT department says that soon we will be able to email anyone anywhere in the world. I cannot fathom this. It’s impossible. My boss enters my office and plonks himself down in my visitor’s chair. “How was your weekend?” he asks. I start to answer, but he interrupts. “What happened to your eye?” “What’s wrong with it?” He peers in and looks at me closely. “Your left eye has turned inwards slightly. And it doesn’t seem to move.” “I got thrown off a horse. Yesterday.” “You need to see an eye doctor. Now. I’ll find someone.” He gets up and I go to the ladies toilet to inspect my lazy eye. It looks fine to me. I cover my right eye to check the left eye still works. It seems to. Back at my desk my boss has scribbled down the name and number of an ophthalmologist. “He’s just down the hill on George Street. Call at nine when they open and make an appointment right away.” The eye doctor tells me the problem is my brain, not my eye. There is nothing he can do. He suggests I get myself to hospital as soon as I can for a brain scan. As I leave his office and walk outside into the bright light of George Street, I am struck by something, but only for a second. Brain injuries can be serious. The thought flashes out of my mind as quickly as it entered it. I ring Jim, my ex-boyfriend, and ask if he will take me to hospital. I call my mother. She will meet us there. 35

ittle good comes from a head injury, but it does cut down the wait when you show up unannounced at the emergency room. The mention of the words “Horse, thrown, head” pushes you up to the front of the line, ahead of everyone apart from babies that have stopped breathing, epileptics, people with heart failure or severed limbs, and funnel web spider bite victims. My mother arrives and we sit down on three scratched green plastic chairs at the back of the room. Almost instantly, my name is called. I am not fearful. In my mind, I am here to check my brain is not bleeding. A hemorrhaging brain sounds serious. And painful. Frankly I have no clue why I’m here. I feel perfectly normal. Even scarier, I look perfectly normal. I have no problem with speech or movement. And I certainly don’t look as though I have anything even remotely wrong with my brain. Apart from my left eye which struggles to keep pace with my right eye. I am led to a small office and seen by a tall man in beige trousers wearing a light brown jumper with patches on the elbow who tells me he is a neurologist. He is condescending before even opening his mouth. He asks what happened. I tell him. He doesn’t examine my head. He only asks, “Were you wearing a helmet?” “No.” “Why not?” “There wasn’t one.” “Well that is very, very silly. You could have been killed, do you realize that?” “No.” I kind of wish I had been, although I don’t tell him this, for fear of spending the next fortnight strapped to a bed in a psych ward. “The first thing we need to do is get you a head scan. We’ll send you off to Imaging and then you’ll come back here. Go back to the waiting room and I’ll call you in when I have the slides.”

I do as he says, and trundle off behind a nurse who leads me half way to Imaging and then tells me to take a left, then a right, then the second door to my left. I nod. I take a wrong turn and end up in a room that says Orthopedic Day Patients. A nurse leads me out and walks me to Imaging. I am the only person waiting for a brain scan. I lie down inside a long plastic shell and close my eyes. I find my way back to the emergency room after a few wrong turns. In the waiting room, my mother looks jittery. Jim is telling her about a new business idea he has but she is not listening. It has dawned on her, I think, that being here, in hospital, me talking to a neurologist, having a brain scan, is a big deal. The waiting room seethes with people, and I am being seen straight away. I sit down with them and wait only moments before my name is called again. The neurologist sits at his desk in his tiny room, looking at pictures of my brain on a lightbox. It looks to me like ten black and white photos of an old mouldy orange. “Can you see this?” he says without glancing at me, using a ballpoint pen to point at the screen. I lean closer. “Bleeding. Can you see it?” “I have no idea what a normal brain looks like.” “A normal brain looks like this.” He points at a different part of my brain. That’s healthy brain tissue. See the difference?” I shrug. “Contusion, we call it. Often follows a concussion. Your brain has been badly bruised. It could have been avoided had you worn a helmet.” “I think you’ve made your point about the helmet. What does it mean?” “We don’t know yet. We’ll send you off to the Brain Centre at Ryde. They’ll do some tests and show us what we can’t see from the scans. You were really silly not to wear a helmet.” “Shut up about the fucking helmet!” 37

A sneer spreads across his face. I have lost whatever scant respect he may have had for me. “The nurse will get you a slot at Ryde. Wait outside for a few minutes.” I return to my mother and Jim in the waiting room. “What’s going on?” my mother asks. “I don’t know. I have to go to Ryde for tests. Then come back here to see the doctor again.” “What did the scan show?” “Contusion.” A nurse comes out within moments with a slip of paper. “We’ve booked you in this afternoon at two o’clock. Is that ok? They have your details so all you need to do is show up.” In the hospital car park, my mother asks, “What else do they need?” “I have no idea.” “I’ll take you.” “No. Jim can take me.” I don’t even ask him. “That’s fine,” he says. “I’ll take her.” I start to argue with my mother. She wants to come. I’m in no mood for this. I snap. “Fuck off!” And she does. I don’t hear a word from her other than a birthday card for nearly a year.

im drives us straight to McDonalds. All this waiting has made him hungry. We find an empty table next to a life size cardboard cutout of Ronald McDonald. I watch him eat two McHappy Meals. He pretends he has no interest in the two plastic Hamburglars, but I see him slip them inside his trouser pocket. McDonalds makes him happy. I am not hungry. I am glad we broke up. Apart from the fact we ran out of things to say to one another long ago, I don’t have to eat here anymore. He finishes his food, wipes his hands on a fresh pile of serviettes, deposits his rubbish in the bin like a good McDonald’s citizen and we walk back to the car. Inside, 38

he reaches across me and slips the two Hamburglars inside the glove box. He looks at me and smiles. “Does Kerry like McDonalds?” I can’t help asking. Kerry is his new, improved girlfriend. He laughs. “Hates it. Even more than you.” We don’t speak at all in the half hour it takes to drive to Ryde. I look out the window and wonder why this is happening. I wish my father was here. He would know what to do. The two hours that follow are the worst two hours of my life. A psychologist called Toby takes me into his office and sits me down. He has curly brown hair, thinning slightly on the top of his head, and kind grey eyes. He wears jeans and a corduroy jacket with suede patches on the elbows and oval glasses with gold rims. Toby asks what I do and where I work. I tell him I am Director of Strategy in the New South Wales Premier’s Department. I do not tell him I am the youngest person to have been appointed to the Senior Executive Service in New South Wales. That would sound boastful. He asks me what I studied at university. I tell him I am part way through a PhD in government. He nods encouragingly. “We’re going to do some simple tests.” “OK. No problem.” I do well on tests as a rule, apart from tests that involve numbers. I am spectacularly bad with numbers. I tell Toby this so as not to alarm him. “That’s OK. Let’s try some basic numeracy tests anyway.” I don’t get the answers wrong. I can’t answer them at all. “Let’s try something else,” Toby suggests. “Basic verbal reasoning.” I do my best to answer Toby’s questions, but I feel a sharp pain inside my head each time I try to think. Summoning up the energy it takes to answers ten simple questions exhausts me. They are not so simple after all. I slump back in my chair and wonder what the hell is happening to me. I look out the window

and notice the venetian blind is broken. Plastic venetian blinds make me sad. They look so cheap. They make me sadder still when they are broken, like a skimpy bikini on a fat woman. “Let’s try this,” Toby says, reaching under his desk and pulling out a large plastic cylinder full of wooden shapes in primary colours. He empties the cylinder on his desk. “Find the blue shapes.” This I manage to do, although Toby seems surprised by how long it takes me. “Take your time,” he says, which I interpret as “What the fuck is wrong with you?” “Good,” he says finally. “Now let’s try something else. I want you to find the red triangle on the desk and put it inside the cut out triangle here, and then do the same with the yellow circle.” He points to an empty red space in the shape of a triangle. “Do you understand?” Yes, I nod, registering that no one has asked me if I understand something since I was in kindergarten. It’s just like the kids game, for kids aged between two and four. I struggle. I manage to place the triangle in the triangle space – I remember what he pointed at – but when it comes to the circle, I can’t for the life of me find it. It’s a trick. There’s no yellow circle, I say. Toby helps out and points at the circle. I bury my head in my hands and sob. Toby passes me a box of tissues. I am beyond tissues. I now know what it’s like to be reasonably clever and pretty stupid. All in the space of two days. Few people can claim that. I sob while Toby tells me it will take him a day to write up his report and send it to the hospital. I sob as I leave his office and make my way to the car park. I sob all the way home and long after Jim has dropped me off and returned to Kerry. I sob as I take the dogs to the park. I sob until I fall asleep that night and an hour later when I wake. I am well and truly fucked. I don’t go back to the hospital. I don’t need to. Late the next day I get a call at home from the neurologist. “Look, you probably guessed the results are not good,” he begins. 40

I don’t say anything. “You scored very poorly on the psychometric tests. If we were talking in terms of IQ, yours would be around 80. These kinds of results are consistent with a Traumatic Brain Injury. Unfortunately, the longer term prognosis isn’t terribly good. I don’t see that you’re going to be able to return to work.” He pauses, then says, “Not to white collar work, anyway.” I’m confused. What does he see me doing in the future? Going down a coalmine? Working on the railways? “Outdoor work might suit you. Do you like the outdoors?” I don’t answer. “Working in a park, that kind of thing.” I cannot speak. “We’ll organize some rehab for you. You’ll have your own social worker and she’ll be able to help you. She’ll let work know too. That you won’t be going back.” I listen, and as the words register I feel as though something inside me might explode. It doesn’t. “What about my PhD?” He clears his throat and I hear the sound of a sneer. There is no way you’ll be able to finish a PhD.” And there it ends. My prognosis. Our conversation. Life as I knew it.

Come Marvel at the Catasquaphonous Carnival of Dick Clark’s Rootin’-Tootin’ New Year’s Eve John F. Buckley and Martin Ott Dick was nervous: he never expected to live long enough to see 1884, much less be the man ushering it in on New Year’s Eve. But surrounded by production assistants in rawhide and coonskin caps, clamoring for his babyfaced attention, he steadied his nerves. People asked him if he was the love child of Lewis and Clark, if the crowd pouring into Longacre Square from the Brooklyn Bridge would tear carriages apart from slugging back Routin and rum, why Josiah H. L. Tuck rode the first submarine like a bull, why the Yankee Broadcast Network telegraph operators dot-dashed the fresh, iron-hot dance steps of teenaged street urchins to stations countrywide. Dick smiled, cracked his whip again and sold tickets, two cents for standing, four for a seat by the midnight inferno. A Wild Bill Hickok impersonator snatched a megaphone prototype from Thomas Edison on a Vin Mariani bender, and the faux cowboy stirred up the crowd while H.G. Wells found himself staring skyward at what appeared to be

a helium balloon in the shape of a cartoon Eloi, all limpid eyes and potbelly. High in its basket, social-media correspondent Nellie Bly scanned the crowd for potential trendsetters, launching a series of tweeting canaries to carry her messages groundward. She wrote that Henry W. Seely was plugged in, electric iron at the ready, shirt collar wings looking as though he might fly. More than one corset was tossed his way as midnight arrived, and Nikola Tesla took in his first light show in the Big Apple, sparks and flames reflected in a transcendent rack of teeth as Dick ascended the bandstand, stepped to the light of the aerial bonfire, ready to be lowered at the count of twelve. They held their breaths and each other as the windows reflected a signal that the future would soon billow beyond the fenced frontiers, a neon zeppelin blinking to the rhythm of horseless riders.

before angels Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhr án

Before we went in all directions: ash held in abalones of shell, roundhouses full of fire and shake. The city recedes into reeds in the distance. Within the boundaries, gathering continues, medicine marked. Before water carried in aqueduct a false green, earth as skyline —layers of bone and soil, blowing off in erosion. Before the plateaus retreat into dunes and raw rock mountains without water, brush grows bush in hills dotted with trees. Eucalyptus sway as if belonging here. Not responsible: roads, children skipping rope in schoolyards beside missions, six and seven and still wanting milk at lunch, to roll the fat on their tongue. Hungry, sand is many colors like flesh-toned bandaids, but for now we’ll assume dried grass teased by thunder. Here and there, a place where water kisses. Still, there is more in the air that reminds of the ocean not seen. Voice, breath, sway; rustle of dry leaves. You know a plant by scent (savia), sight (zarzamora), sound (eucalipto), only sometimes by name.

Dreams of water, I did not dehydrate that year, so irrigated; didn’t know dryness, thirst, didn’t gather or make offering, drank myself into oblivion, walked on and over and around and off campus into histories longer than any inland empire’s capacity for holding memory —to visit a place that wasn’t; to gather in the places that were— off and around and into the homes of those who gardened and cooked, south, east, of any campus I’ve lived, the families, Nations who built and cleared, planted everything they could not eat. I knew one, ate with them, saw barrio south of tracks, took a patch for a son who died years before my arrival. Un abogado, queer, Chicano, many years in the Bay, tío I had not known, brought my brother, patchwork, to the Quilt. Saw the thousands laid out before him beneath some nation’s capitol. I have always walked in the steps of those before me. I try to acknowledge this more, offer songs, tabaco my trembling hand couldn’t then.

Long Way Down Maria Freij

When I was nine I climbed the rope at school all the way to the ceiling; my classmates cheered and clapped. It was horrible, up there, the way the ceiling cracked and chipped like skin; gypsum dust fell like snow into my eyes. For the first time since I’d taken the coarse rope between my hands, I turned my head downward to see the excitement and fear on my friends’ faces and I froze. It was such a long way down. I do not remember how long I was up there or how I got down. But I do remember the paralysis, the rope slipping in my sweaty palms. I tell them this story now, and I can tell I’ve told it too often. If that’s the worst thing that ever happened to you, they say, then you should be very happy. They don’t understand—I want them to know what it means that when I was nine, I knew death, knew it all. * 46

I used to know whether I’d had afternoon coffee, whether I’d eaten, or slept. I used to know the way from here to there, where the key was, what lock it opened. I used to know their names, these girls who smile and nod, whose whispers they think, and that I pretend, I don’t hear. These days, I’m sure I have forgotten something important, among the many things left behind. Of course I remember, I tell them when they show me the black-and-white photographs; when they give me my pills, one for every colour in the rainbow; when they find my notes in the top drawer, all with the same words, same digits; when they lead me to the table to be fed. I used to know the difference between twenty kinds of meat, where to buy what cut for the best price, and on what day it would be fresh.

I would hold the perfect pinch of salt between my thumb and index finger and let it go a grain at a time. It would dissolve in the steam before it hit the boiling water. I preserved rhubarb, plums, apples; I pickled herring and baked bread. I cooked and cleaned and breathed and slept with ease. I used to attend to everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s every need. I used to know the time of day to cut the roses to make them last longer, when to speak, when not to. Now they tell me I must rise, wash, eat. What does it mean, this word, hunger? * It may be true that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve told the same story too many times, but who can blame me? There are only so many ways to make sure you are not misunderstood, at the end of the day. You see, a memory is never just that; instead, it is a beast that slumbers in us as we grow tall, grow old, and it wakes as we grow weary:

sometimes in the morning, in the glade between waking and sleep, I find myself right up on the ceiling, my palms clammy, my heart racing. Below, all my friends, children with ninety-year-old faces, all the nurses, even you, cheer and clap. The rope burns hot in my hands. And I am tired now, and you are such a long way down and so excited, loud, and eager as you call my name. As you tell me to let go.

Reading Material Stephen lynch

r Mason’s is the only dentist’s waiting room I’ve been in that has magazines on refrigeration and air conditioning. There’s five of those among the piles of magazines on the little mahogany table at the centre of the room. Sitting there waiting to see the good doctor, you can fill yourself in on the latest in commercial cooling, f-gas regulators and heat pump innovation. And that’s only the start. Dr Mason has a disorientating range of reading material in his waiting room. This is a man who cares about many things. There are magazines on fitness and outdoor sports, with pictures of people scaling mountains, biking dirt tracks, their hair thrown back by the wind, their boots kicking up earth at dynamic angles. National Geographic offers blanched vistas marked by the wiry black figures of sub-Saharan famers and their bony goats. A BBC History Magazine zips through the rise of the Aztecs, the fall of the Romans, the power struggles in the court of Henry VIII, all illustrated with busy timeline graphics and sideboxes of did-you-know facts. There are more than a few copies of Top Gear Magazine— enough to suggest a subscription—and several issues of Classic Cars, Bike and Auto Express. The man likes his motor vehicles. It’s exhausting. This heap of flash and colour is so vigorous and robust it’s a wonder the effete legs of the mahogany coffee table can support it. But what of the lack of women’s magazines? Mostly that’s all you find in waiting rooms, alongside the

obligatory daily newspapers. Usually it’s all Good Housekeeping, Women’s Way and Marie Claire. Sex tips and flan recipes. Which is all well and good, and to be expected since most waiting room material comes from the physician’s wives. But not in Dr Mason’s waiting room. At a glance, the magazines selection offers two possibilities. One, Dr Mason’s wife does not read magazines. Or two, Dr Mason does not have a wife. When you finally meet the man after an hour in his waiting room, you will see a man in his fifties. Late fifties. Tall enough. Grey. Distinguished. But with a bit of a paunch. A little round in the shoulders. Glasses. Not exactly an outdoor man. He moves slowly, relaxed in his way, though he’s not afraid to get tough with your molars, eager to dig and pull in a way that makes you wish you never had teeth in the first place. And when he’s done and you hoist yourself off the chair with your mouth ringing, he’ll make some jovial comment to lighten the atmosphere and you’ll be thankful this likable, talented man is your dentist. Dr Mason has the air of an affable uncle or a retired professor. You can imagine him in a cardigan with a glass of malt to hand, his glasses sitting halfway down the bridge of his nose. He looks well-read, cultured. The radio in his surgery is tuned to a classical music station so that you are comforted by the likes of Mahler, Mozart and Bizet while you lie there, eyes shut, mouth open. So what of the magazines? Sure, the occasional history magazine is not a stretch; Dr Mason is a man of the world. No doubt his shelves at home are lined with books on medieval history, World War II, ancient civilisations. But what use does a laid-back man in his late fifties have for the latest issues of Bike, Men’s Fitness, and the Engineers Journal? Perhaps, like other dentists, Dr Mason too sources his material from his partner. Only his partner is a young man.

There is the risk of presumption, sure. The danger of jumping to conclusions. And there are other possibilities. Maybe there’s a son from a failed marriage. Or a patient contributes. A neighbour. Then again, there’s something about Dr Mason that’s too mannered, too perfectly ordinary to be fully convincing. He never mentions a wife and his finger is ring-free anyway. He treats his receptionist and nurse with antiseptic professionalism. There’s something in the way he talks, low and confidential, close to intimate, that suggests there are aspects of his private life that conflict with his appearance of ordinariness. There’s the sense of a double life about the man. So if the magazines are those of Dr Mason’s young man, what of the young man? He must be the outdoorsy type. Gym fit. With an interest in engineering. An apprenticeship underway. Perhaps a college degree in the works. But maybe he struggles with money and finds in Dr Mason the attractiveness of a easy-going older gent with a serious bank account. How did they meet? Perhaps the young man was a patient. And Dr Mason, against his better judgment, saw himself in this lad, namely, his younger self, who excelled at college, who joined every team of every sport there was to play, who threw caution to the wind and drank and messed about with fellow students, strangers, older men. Perhaps they spend weekends at the young man’s flat—a bedsit somewhere—strewn with socks and boxers, sports bags stuffed with sweaty clothes, magazines piled everywhere and nothing in the cupboards but soup and pasta. Other weekends are possibly spent at Dr Mason’s small house where he cooks for the lad, something French or Moroccan, showing him the subtlety of wine and talking him out of making the same mistakes he did as a young man. Despite their differences, or because of them, they carry on like this, dipping toes in each other’s lives, for Dr Mason, the past, for the lad, the future. But how long do these things

last? How long before the lad tires of the advice and shelves of encyclopedias? Maybe the lad is already gone and the lines beneath Dr mason’s eyes are evidence of this. No one looks forward to going home to an empty house, I can tell you that. Dinner for one, TV, and then bed. Perhaps the doctor himself ended the relationship, preemptively, knowing it would lead nowhere or possibly fearing repercussions if it was found he was seeing a patient. The spectre of professional disgrace forced him to second guess his romantic folly, and brought home to him the fact that he was now largely consigned to a life alone. Why does he keep the magazines? The poor doctor can’t bring himself to clear the coffee table, to dispose of the glossy stack and move on. Or else he’s forgotten about the table—how often does a dentist visit his own waiting room anyway?--and someday while looking for something - misplaced keys, a file - he’ll wander in there on the off-chance and stop dead at the sight of the magazines. The cars, the skidding bikes, the brawn of marathon runners, the whole ladish flare that made up this kid who stepped into his life and left him with nothing but twenty-something magazines of nonsense. Oh, the things that cross your mind when you are at the mercy of Dr Mason. When all you can hear is the sound of the drill and all you can taste is the dust of your own teeth, the good doctor stooping overhead, his soft breathing audible through his face mask, his eyes focused on the darkest reaches of your mouth, the weight of his hand on your bottom lip, the tip of his pinky resting on your tongue. Saliva. Blood.

translations

ur Tid: en sång om Trojas murar Johannes Anyuru

... Nere i parken spelar de fotboll och chilenare, kurder och somalier möts i ett ansiktsuttryck eller ett språk lika ärligt framslängt över hustaken som skymningen, sandslott i ett glas himmel, förlösande, hemlig (hemliga färger, hemliga fäder). De jagar den vita bollen över himlen och jublar när den smäller in i ribban. Man hör inga svenska ord här: till och med araberna har lärt sig att skrika

Mira! Mira!

när de rusar efter en perfekt slagen passning längs cykelvägens kant. Vackra röntgen! Som om kriget, under ett enda underbart ögonblick inte fanns, glädjen som tänds i ögonen och slungas över fältet när kropparna föds på nytt och på nytt ur värkande muskler och skratt 56

from Time: a song about the walls of Troy Translated from the Swedish by Mikael Lopez

... They’re playing football down in the park and Chileans, Kurds and Somalis meet in an expression or a language as honestly cast over rooftops as dusk, sandcastles in a glass of sky, liberating, secret (secret colors, secret fathers). They chase the white ball across the sky and cheer when it slams into the crossbar. You won’t hear any Swedish words here: even the Arabs have learned to shout

Mira! Mira!

when they rush after a perfect pass along the edge of the bikeway. Beautiful vision! As if the war, for one, single wonderful moment didn’t exist, the joy that lights up in the eyes and is flung across the field when bodies are born again and again from aching muscles and laughter 57

eller ur den hemliga triumfen i ett trick intränat under vårhimlar av bly, bollen som hänger helt stilla över den eritreanske pojkens uppåtvända ansikte – en ny svart planet, dess måne –

or from the secret triumph of a trick practiced under leaded spring skies, the ball hangs motionless over the Eritrean boy’s face turned up – a new black planet, its moon –

旅馆左右窗外倒立着天空的树。火车像云朵上掉下来的没有裂痕的缺口。今夜我和蝙蝠们在一起为黑暗低歌。岩石紧缩着四个手指头墙面越来越和逝去十年的老祖母— —脸庞吻合空荡荡的钟，和路灯交杂在一起。月光下茶香喷喷。吹笛的女旅客，住在我左手隔壁她一只油铜色的乳房，掉在被外。忧伤满面吹出空荡荡的回声谁家的猫突然窜在桌面上，茶杯翻滚。它一直在鼓足勇气：轻手轻脚，溜进女旅客滚烫的被角

The Hotel Zuo You Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing Celestial trees stand upside down outside the window. The train a crackless gap falling down from the clouds. Tonight I stay with bats, crooning for darkness. Rocks contract their four fingers. The wall gradually resembles the face of my grandma who died a decade ago. Empty bells mingle with streetlight. Under the moon, the tea is fragrant. A guest stays in the adjoining room, playing the flute. One of her oil-copper breasts lies outside the quilt. Laden with grief, she plays a series of vacant echoes. Whose cat suddenly jumps on the table? A teacup rolls. It keeps up its courage: tiptoed, it creeps into the hot edge of the womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quilt.

桃花上的卦盘左右寒夜来临。雨一直下着，带有清新的空气身体里的卦盘旋转个不停，花瓣沾在地角风随意识轻轻敲门。唇上的沙漏预告过我：在哪里遗失过你，我就梦回哪里

Horary Chart zou You Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing Cold night falls. It keeps raining. The air is fresh. Inside me, a horary chart is turning without stop. Petals clinging to the ground. A conscious wind gently knocks at my door. The sandglass on my lips has foretold: my dream will go back to where you are lost.

书店老板的恐惧朱剑突然飘起了雪才下午四点多天就快黑了街上行人很少书店里人更少就我一个不对，不对其实还是很多人不过他们老不说话他们躺在精美的对，精美的棺材里一点声响都没有这不就是太平间么天已经全黑了

The Horror of a Bookstore Owner zhu jian Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing. It suddenly snows. Shortly after 4 p.m., it’s getting dark. There are few people on the streets, and in this bookstore, even fewer. Me alone, to be exact. Oh no, not so, There are still many people here who never speak a word, lying in exquisite – yes, exquisite coffins, not making a sound. Isn’t that a morgue? It’s completely dark now.

骷髅之诗朱剑一只骷髅对另一只骷髅产生的优越感来自于五百年前镶嵌的至今还在闪闪发光的那颗金牙

The Skull zhu jian Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing. The superiority of a human skull over another skull comes from the one gold tooth fixed to it five hundred years ago that still glitters.

Bloodlines & waterlines

salt lake sisters Ha Kiet Chau we are wanderers of geology, paddling a boat on a lake that tastes like salt. cohabiting with amphibians, this lake is not ours, it’s an extension of ourselves in water. peer into an eyepiece, our see-through reflections, clear as binocular vision, adjust the focal range, the focus is on us: two sisters clutching a boxful of dreams, and if we were to drown them in the basin, we’d be lost orphans— who are we without something tangible to hold onto? you and your ukulele, me and my journal. we’re losing grip of each other on a lake. drops of acoustic, lyrics and four strings, your clef notes, my verbs and nouns, listen to them ricochet like pebbles off water. from identification cards, to birth certificates, our baggage, our minds and bodies twined in algae and seaweed. the end result has nature lamenting and mother—

she, who seldom cries in the summer expresses condolences for her daughters in the deluge of rain, in sighs of grays and gloom, carried all the way into autumn.

To this woman who was supposed to be a random woman Ieva Krivick aite

So there was this pancake chirping in the pan like a bird and when I ate it, the chirping was inside of me and I spoke with my mouth closed, and I said â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I want to be your daughter I said â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I am trading every moment of satisfaction in my life to a morning in your flat maybe cleaning out your bookshelves or fixing your Facebook for you or just sensing your core the growth rings of which are also my growth rings So there was this life stripped bare in front of my eyes embarrassed like a teenager in gym showers not entirely aware of its beauty and pureness and I wanted to drink it as if it was a spring in the mountains rippling at my feet after a hike there were these eyes, a little bit tired of living, maybe but not tired of loving the kind of eyes that would suit a village kid as well as an interwar lady just that the war is not about guns anymore itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about words and time slicing the time in equal pieces so that no one gets hurt even though I would trade all of these pieces to a single bite of your laughter 72

especially the secret laughter, when no one else knows or when we flirt with men whose age are somewhere between you and me we built our home on a bridge even though no one builds houses on bridges but we built our home on a bridge between your world and my world

Aerial Pas de Deux Fr ancine Rubin

On stage I tip my hat, say Love-ly day for a matinee Backstage, you listen for Love-; on the balls of your feet climb rungs, counting three two one. My voice timed to the magic of your swing, I skip a beat and point:

The beautiful Jeanne-Marie!

Each arc guided by the sonar of my cries, you fly, purple tulle sailing wide.

She was born in air!

We are balletic whales, our echolocations charting your blue

course, my harmonic song,

our tethered center. 74

Theme

Douglas Cole Late night maybe morning heading home through wet dark streets under the glow of fleur de lis lanterns with their minaret globes she climbs the stairs the carpeted smell of years to enter a room overlooking the gray slate rooftops and redbrick chimneys and that one lone tower under the blood smear of clouds in a smoky predawn haze to fall fall back upon a bed after the search that yielded nothing now this now hearing the crazy neighbors and other voices and one sound like a trumpet call like a wish for death and sweet release through the bottom of the well of elusive sleep with a ghost at the door and water traveling through the pipes in the wall

from The Architect Mik ael Lopez ”Don’t ask me where I come from, ask me where I’m going. Don’t ask me what I’ve built, ask me what I will build. I don’t care about the past, it bores me, and the present is almost the past!” (The Architect, interview with journalist, 1978) ”Almost fifty years since I saw it, my mother’s house looked just like when I left it, like fifty years ago was yesterday, like she was still there. I realized I could never build anything like that house.” (The Architect, private conversation, 2011) III The Architect’s Funeral The Obituary The day after, between obits, a short notice said: The Architect is Dead (49 – 13) Designed by himself, not a sign of humility, a final sign of style, minimalist simplicity. 76

... The Architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Son Speaks at the Funeral They say I must be proud to be the son of the Great Architect who built our city I am not proud at all of the concrete cages he built, leaving us no key

Nonsensical John Sibley Williams I find a child flaying flesh from his father’s belt. In the next room a dog trains his master how to beg for another’s scraps. Down the hall a ghost weeps over a family’s rearrangement of furniture. The skeletons of the dead are afraid to open the closet. And an old man who lost his legs in one war or another frantically paces holes in the living room carpet. The wife he blames for their grown child’s failures rubs ointment without question on his phantom limbs. It’s the dead air in each room that keeps the house from falling in around us. The walls are flowerless vases. The photographs blank rectangles. Their edges gold, framing nothing worth remembering. And when we’re silent it’s as if we can hear the belt cry across generations, feel the spine of the house shiver, rattling the dead birds from the chimney.

Learning Transparency

John Sibley Williams Stage 1 Although we were nothing like birds, even less like wind, we flew headfirst into the closed window, then circled around and tried to enter again at a different angle. Stage 2 A few years later we took to a road that seemingly led to some distant elsewhere. Steam rose from the summer gravel and confused the painted lines of escape, returning us home. Stage 3 Now water overflows the vase, staining circles into the table where wingless and silent we remember how to forget. Through curved glass, we see flowers, brilliant and bursting; still you pour the water that will one day kill them while I finger the vase in search of their colors, then circle around and try again with my heart. 79

Catalogue of Lessons Josefin ullberg

I learned nothing from eating the baby beets my mother cut onto my plate, and the hiking guides I read on foreign lips that asked first about my accent and then all else, like favorite color or gender. Or when my neighbor invited me for tea and cake with the image of Israelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s president in marzipan, I learned nothing from eating a piece of his blue tie while she preached about turning the other cheek. I learned nothing from rolling a cigarette in the thin pages of a Bible. But really I am too indoctrinated into the notion of sin that I decided on using the badly burning paper from a phone catalogue instead. I learned nothing from the countless affairs with imaginary beings and then kissing my best friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brother and not being able to think of anything except not doing it again and doing it again.

I learned nothing from being afraid of most things except heights and large dogs, then suddenly becoming aware of my own mortality so that limbs grow gangly around someone who may or may not have breast cancer. I learned nothing from connecting life events like a historian framing the past as a genre and all I see is a rope leading back and sometimes my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face.

Enhanced Care Unit

K ate North

Shape of a woman

hung like cloth

in a sauna. Five souls, a standing circle around her.

Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so small tiny. A not silence, broken breath between us.

Her hands an obscure fact that will keep crashing back, in the shower, tying a lace,

at the wheel and against cheeks.

Hold, siblings intertwined, 82

wet skin on skin,

then the rack-stack rigidity, Russian dolls descending

in awkward acquaintance,

mice to owls.

Natural confrontations

Vision Science Jody azzouni

’m mortified when I hear, when we hear—for after all, if I’ve heard anything, Mark’s certainly heard it—the tapping of a cane at the other end of the subway car the sliding door slamming shut as the car turns sharply in the tunnel, and I bow my head in anticipated shame, I pray to God that Mark somehow have pity on my fear of public confrontation (the loud exchange over misplaced hot soup; the cursing match across two languages between taxi drivers). “Oh please please please,” I beg the unresponsive deity, may Mark be struck with sleeping sickness; may he be struck right now. Take my advice: don’t place your hopes on busy major deities. No sooner has the unsuspecting sunglassed, canecarrying man with proverbial tin cup reached us than Mark begins a well-practiced harangue, “How dare you, you fake lazy con artist give the impression that blind people are helpless invalids in need of charity. Look how you and your slovenly fellow travelers perpetuate the handicap cliché. But let’s be frank for a moment, shall we? What the nonsighted need from the unthinking sighted all around them is greater insight, not dismissive and stale coins. Get off this train you manipulative creep and find a job. Here’s my business card if you’re at a loss for suggestions in this area.” Mark’s rich voice effortlessly carries itself above the ebb and flow of ordinary noise but his last, somewhat generous gesture is wasted as always. Mark’s prey has already slipped through to the next car 86

leaving behind a muttered curse. Meanwhile, slumped in my seat, I sneak a look through my fingers at the other occupants, but they’re New Yorkers: their faces inscrutable stone. Mark is perhaps the only genuine genius I’ve ever met. He works his magic with computers, his most recent project designing software “to prove various hypotheses in evolutionary and developmental biology.” I watched this project in action: angry geometric objects, speedy octagons and pentagons, the occasional clumsy square or sluggish triangle, an unremarkable chiliagon hopping over what looked like unkempt peat moss Mark called the virtual plantlife, “a fitness landscape.” The aggressive geometric objects would circle each other cautiously, expand a little, shrink a little like two cats beginning a fight, and then savagely poke each other with their pointy angles, Mark cheering them on, “Stick it to him; you can do it!” It was territorial war with obscure rules “Just think of goldfish,” Mark explained mysteriously, more than once. Occasionally a fatally wounded one would stagger about, flop over, and then bleed out its extension over the moss; occasionally another, after killing its opponent, would do a victory dance and split into identical twins during a phase of morphic anxiety that made my fingers twitch. This was not silent drama. The computer beeped and whirred continuously as each object emitted its noise triangles: thumptythumptythump; the chiliagon: reperepereperepereperep; and these things chattered away in different octaves, timbres and resonances as they sparred, died, and reproduced. Even the lightning came with its metallic CRACRACRAAAACKBOOOOM. Mark would listen intently and giggle over the sounds he’d custom-designed, pointing out the ones he thought especially cute. The finer points of the aesthetics here—this cybernetic riot of noise,

an auditory eclecticism—were lost on me. Mark explained that evolutionary processes were being simulated by this geometric dance concert (he used the term “sequence space”). After the brutal octagons wiped out the other shapes, he had the evidence to write up two or three articles which became classics on why the hummingbird’s tongue is shaped the way it is. Before this, he’d been designing programs that prove outstanding mathematical conjectures, but he’d stopped after the third one because of the hate mail from mathematicians. “They’re really pissed off that my proof of Fermat’s last theorem is only three lines long.” He even got threats from someone who claimed to be the Unabomber. “Nah,” I told him, “surely they won’t let him send mail.” Anyway, I could go on for hours about how smart Mark is, and how much he’s done, that little spat with the AMA is something I’m sure you’ve heard about, the whole thing was written up in Scientific American and there was also his determining important elements of the genetic code for one or two species of rhizopus, but really this is all a digression. What I need to tell you about is our canoe trip, and how it ended our friendship. I can’t describe myself as an avid canoeist; to be honest I’d done it maybe a half dozen times in twice as many years; although when I was in college, I was good enough to be in one or two canoeing trips. Well, that’s what they were called at my college. So I regarded it as a totally dumb idea when Mark first made the suggestion: me and him, and a friend maybe, going canoeing upstate. I guess he thought I was being condescending about the whole thing and I guess maybe I was when I said if they were going to be assholes about this, I didn’t see why I had to participate. Why couldn’t they just do it alone, and in that way guarantee that they’d all drown? 88

Well, somehow I find myself on board anyway. Mark has this really convincing voice, remember, and he’s really persistent too, and so there I am, on the river with these guys and I am in a really really bad mood after all I’d done all the driving. Mark had sprung yet another guy on me in addition to Greg—overrode my objections about this being maybe too many for the canoe—and then they’d spent the whole trip telling each other awful grapefruit puns. I’d also slept badly, and I was a little hung over too. Despite this, it doesn’t seem to be going as badly as I expected: every now and then I have to say, “Greg, don’t dip your oar in so deep,” or call out to Mark, “A little harder,” but they’re surprisingly good at coordinating the rowing, What’s-His-Name chanting “Stroke” the way you should. I’d forgotten how noisy a river trip can be: the gargling sounds of white water, the various natterings of insect and beast chewing, and being chewed, the other nearby canoers and rafters remarking on the weather and who’s getting a divorce from whom a couple of idiots with megaphones, drinking beer, and yelling at each other as they drift downriver aimlessly, and worst of all, this thick churr of birdnoise. None of it was doing my hangover any good. Well, these guys notice everything, and I guess they decided to have a little fun at my expense. Greg starts things off by suddenly cocking up his head, and saying, “Why I do believe that’s a Bonasa umbellus.” Mark picks it right up, “No way.” What’s-His-Name joins in, “Listen: ‘bup … bup … bup.” Mark, “You’re right, it’s the male.” Greg and What’s-His-Name chirp in chorus, “Bup-up-rrrrrrr.” And then Mark, “Hear that Icterus galbula?” What’s-His-Name, “Sure do, and it’s a young one, hear that ‘tee-deedee?” Greg, “Gosh, that’s so cute; listen to those cool fricatives.” Mark, “And, over

to the left, of all things, a Spiza americana!” This cracks them all up for some reason I’m rolling my eyes at this point, but that doesn’t do any good, and then they start making bird noises together, “Dick-ciss-ciss-ciss … chup-chup-klip-klip-klip.” At the time I was sure they were pulling my leg and I still think so because I couldn’t see how anyone could have distinguished bird burps in that olio of noise. But they kept it up for a little, giggling over anecdotes about bizarre mating habits or the various perverse things you can do with an egg, wondering idly how a particular latinate flying thing got over to the east coast when its native habitat is some tidbit of an island off the coast of Australia, until they finally decide to break into a cappella which started because of some particularly rhythmic birdcall they were chanting. I moan, put my fingers in my ears, close my eyes. That’s how we ended up in the water: hitting a rock. Imagine Jack-in-the-boxes suddenly set free. One thing these guys couldn’t do very well was swim; unfortunately neither could I. Luckily for all of us, there were lots of people nearby, and a number of them were generously pounding the water towards us when I went under. Dozens of movies have scenes like this: shivering, blankets draped around us, our clothes elsewhere drying, hopefully. The only thing that’s different apart from the fact that none of us have thermometers in our mouths is that I just had to give a report to a park ranger: he does a lot of staring at me when I answer certain questions I feel like a felonious idiot. But Mark and his buddies aren’t concerned at all. They’re happily back on those awful grapefruit puns. To top it off, this splendidly attractive woman comes over and enthusiastically gushes on us, “I hear that you guys are all blind. That’s so cool.” “Not me,” I say grumpily, but she ignores me. What is

this? If she doesn’t like guys who can see, why does she dress like that? They all hit it off quite marvelously, her giggling baby Marilyn, voice occasionally breaking through the conversation I’m stuck in, a bratty nine year old and his frosty mother asking, “How come you went boating with a bunch of blind guys, don’t you have any other friends?” The mother saying, “Don’t embarrass him, can’t you see he’s all wet?” Greg and What’s-His-Name soon join us to give Mark a little room with the ditz, I realize, and moments later Mother and I are practicing silent meditation with each other while everyone else is merrily chirping Tyrannus verticalis. Don’t misunderstand what happened next. I wasn’t jealous. Rather, we were running up against an issue that time and time again caused serious rifts in our friendship. I don’t mean to slight Mark’s moral character, of course, but whenever he met someone he was attracted to, he’d pool all his sighted friends’ views on her looks. Don’t underestimate what I mean by “pool”: we had to fill out a substantial survey he’d designed: detailed questions about the shape of the eyes, the nose, broadness of cheekbones, shimmer and body of hair, gestalt effects of blends of features in the face; questions about how to classify her type of beauty (“classical,” “baroque,” “neoimpressionistic”), not to mention all the details about morph-type, breast-quality, curvature of the leg, and a bizarre rating system he called “the Vogue Scale,” which had something to do with whether she had hips or not. And all this, as you may have guessed, wasn’t just idle curiosity either. More than once he’d dropped somebody outright (somebody nice!) because he felt she hadn’t been rated highly enough by the rest of us. I’d argued with him about his “desperate caving in to your infirmity.” He’d call me insensitive (an important putdown in his circle), and

“glib beyond repair.” He had some crazy theory that the primary factor in social standing among what he called “the light-sensitive,” or more nastily, “the light-hearted,” is surface appearance, and he, like everyone else in a society controlled by eyeballing, had to keep up appearances. “You’re really jealous,” he tells me on the phone the evening after the canoe trip, having apparently picked up something in my tone. “No. I’m not,” I say. “She’s a total idiot—I think eyesight is way overrated, what kind of dumb remark is that? And her name’s Casa Blanca? That’s not her real name. God, Mark, she’s from Long Island, can’t you tell?” “She’s a model,” Mark explains, but I hear an edge in his voice. I press on, “And she’s not that good looking either.” She’s not? Impact: joyously I let him mention—sputter out brokenly is more like it—that someone with sight that was crucial, poked him in the ribs and whispered, “You’re one lucky guy; what I wouldn’t give to get some of that.” I wait a second before I go on (silence is a powerful tool when sound is landscape), “You must know what it’s like with models, the camera puts on twenty pounds or so, widens the face substantially.” meaningful pause here, “So if your face— and body too—in a photograph or on film naturally rivet the eye, it can only be because in person you’ve got a weirdly narrow head and bizarrely thin figure.” “That’s not true.” “Oh god, it is, it is.” He doesn’t say anything it’s sinking in. I count silently to five, and continue, “Why do you think models and actresses never have relationships with men that last?” I cry out, “Why is it they’re always getting divorced?” “Everyone is,” Mark’s voice is quite small.

“But they’re worse statistically and you know why? Because the guys they’re dating feel ambivalent: here they are going out with someone whose face in scare quotes is splashed all over the media, many have used her picture for certain purposes. Naturally their bar-buddies are jealous, asking them, So what’s it like huh? huh? huh? you can tell me. And the sad sad reality is they have to look regularly into a pinched narrow face, gaze unsuccessfully into strange eyes set way too close together.” “I never heard of this,” Mark says. “Some things no one talks about. I mean these women are cultural icons, the Fashion Industry has clout you know. Imagine pointing out during the Middle Ages that God doesn’t exist Ouch, to put it mildly. Same thing here. Some things, you see them, but you never say them.” And later I say, “The male models, it’s even worse for the male models,” but I’d already won. I’d like to say that I felt even a little guilty. But the truth is I didn’t. Anyway, no harm done as far as I could see: Mark continued to date Casa Blanca over the next few weeks, and then he invited me to dinner. Things still looked innocent when we came into the dining room. I hadn’t seen Casa Blanca yet (she was elsewhere, “changing”), and Mark had just shown me plans for his latest whizdad, a robot that mops floors. He sits us at the dining table where a lovely timbale is cooling nearby, a tub of delicious quark. I’m momentarily silent while he whistles, his head turned up at the ceiling for some reason. And then she wafts in. Above the midriff, something a blouse? Suddenly: olivaceous ripe fruit fully splitting open, bordered by a divided zipper, each serrated half, the midriff again, the sheerly present legs, möbiusly crossing and recrossing; curvilinearity: soft angles echoing through the translucent fabric that repeatedly

creams itself over itself; she has hips, I realize with a shock; the midriff again. Well, I’ll try to do better the next time I tell this story. Anyway, here’s the moral: You can chant over and over, like a mantra: cosmetic surgery, cosmetic surgery, cosmetic surgery, but it won’t set you free. Everything below the staircase still humming even as you mutter how fake you think it all is. I gulp and gasp but sotto voce as she seats herself so that remain in full view to me throughout dinner. Where did they get this oddly shaped glass table and why? And each time I look up perchance at her, her eyes alight on me like silent twinning bluebirds. Oh God her eyes: did I mention her eyes? I hope my reaction’s not visible, but I discover Mark, turning towards me a grin (let’s not forget that), saying, “I believe I smell pheromones.” Me: grabbing madly for the handsome quark sitting in its splendid casing, hoping its white color and tangy flavor will distract me from the image I have of myself oozing. I desperately send my mind in search of a soothing non sequitor: did James Joyce ever eat quark? He lived in Geneva, after all. Meanwhile I swear to God to the left of me I hear snuffling and Casa Blanca tittering. Sound riot. “What the fuck was that all about?” I ask later on the phone. “Did you have to wheeze and sniggle and snort throughout the whole meal?” “Normally men are repelled by the pheromones of other men. And the same is true of women. I don’t want you to think there’s some sort of gay thing going on here. There’s this lovely experiment where various pheromones are sprayed on a row of chairs…” To hell with people spraying pheromones on chairs. I deny he can smell anything at all, insist again that it’s all a really dumb joke, he tells me about the jobs he almost had because of his keen sense of smell, perfume companies offering positions

in the high six digits. “It’s not as impressive as it sounds: only a matter of degusting carefully.” “A matter of what?” He explains. Then there’s a quote from Jane Austin about tea tasting and something about how it’s all a matter of making clear distinctions and supplying nomenclature. There are ethical issues to consider of course. Is it appropriate to embarrass your guests? play on their weaknesses? parade something semi-dressed in front of them while they’re trying to manage a timbale or nibble the end of a quark? think of all the Pepto Bismol I had to drink later, but there’s no stopping Mark. He finishes off his spiel with some crap about the aesthetics of voyeurism and French surrealism. I don’t remember how the rest of the conversation went, I was really upset, at some point I must have repeated my complaints about the snorting, surely it couldn’t have thrilled Casa Blanca, I told him but my memory of the occasional glimpse I directed her way belied me. And he said this too, “Casa Blanca thinks you’re pretty cool, she’d like it if you’d come over next Sunday.” Did I do it? Oh you bet. Repeat performance, different costume. I shouldn’t have, after all, remember dignity? remember honor? But they took advantage of something starving in me and for several weeks we fell into this really weird routine no one talking about what we were doing or why. And then, once or twice, things went too far because they needed to engage with one another at that very moment. “You have to go home; do it now!” they yelled at me as they ran into the bedroom. In the shower later—sullenly thinking about how used I felt. Don’t think about them. Oh wow, how kinky, think of my newly acquired neurotic obsession with deodorants, colognes,

unguents, think of the allergies I subsequently acquired from over-cleaning myself, the therapy bills from Dr. Friedman, with just a hint of jealousy coloring her voice, “Describe that again, won’t you? I don’t think I’ve seen it in Vogue yet.” There’s another story I could tell you now titled, say, “Tales of Sarah”, about how something faintly akin to love at first sight spiced with a certain desperation can supply an initial velocity even a little acceleration to the center of mass of two people how the inevitable friction, rotational velocity, torque, the generation of heat and light, and other forces, eventually drag that velocity again to zero. The short version: I met someone, and I slept with her. So the last time I see Mark and Casa Blanca is months ago, about six. They suspect nothing. I sit down, ready myself for The Entrance, and Have No Reaction At All. It takes moments for them to get it, Mark’s nose in the air, searching, searching, Casa Blanca still doing something in her chair that looks midway between slinky and wriggle. And then it happens while forks rise to mouths. We communicate with our eyes, Mark slumped a little in his chair, his head directed towards the tabletop. Her eyes aren’t performing now: just looking, seeing me—perhaps for the first time. This is painful. I don’t look away. So much there now that she’s actually looking: there’s fragility, caring really, intelligence, a lot of it; the recognition. I know that under other circumstances, in another place another time we could have been friends, perhaps even good friends. And this too: a choice. It is times like this when God judges us: heaven or hell. I can have pity, play along, help them over this strange hump in their relationship like a benevolent outsider, the kindly friend. And I could too: the emotion radiating to me for the first time is just the edge I need, if I chose to. 96

If I chose to. I let my eyes sidle away to the table, edible foliage waiting, and ask if anyone minds if I start. With this our friendship is over. When the door shut behind me after “Let’s do this again soon,” I step forward a little on the sidewalk, close my eyes tightly for a moment, hold out my hands: listen, smell, feel, attempt sympathy. There’s rain, drizzle really; I smell nothing at all; I hear, maybe, a garbage truck, voices, the slap of footware against the sidewalk, a car moving, not much, hardly enough. I open my eyes, scamper a few steps, look around to see if I’ve embarrassed myself in public, walk off with my dignity intact.

Natural Confrontations Changming Yuan

Seabird As if right from heaven A snowy seagull charges down Trying to pick up the entire ocean With its bold beak As the tsunami raises All its fierce fists In sweeping protection Against earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agitation In foamy darkness Plum Blossom Without a single leaf Grass-dyed or sun-painted To highlight it But on a skeletal twig Glazed with dark elegies A bud is blooming, bold and blatant Like a drop of blood As if to show off, to challenge The entire season When whims and wishes Are all frozen like the landscape

Whirlwind A gossamer-like breeze Left far behind By a running dog Tries to strike The stagnated twilight Hanging above the whole city Before the storm sets in

Toad Cactus Sar ah Ann Winn Put it on paper, extract it gingerly from the scene, away from the opalized emerald flies, clustering on the petals, those limpid peels, specked red dot citrine and rot, edges creep inwards, rounding out, saddle stitched red, shrinking away from the scent of the struck doe on the roadside twenty years past. Your aunt fished her purse for coral lipstick, lined her lips after every doctor filed through. Later, her passive hands opened like petals, and would not accept offers, then squeezed and would not let go. The flower is reluctant to release its name. Let everything wither at last, even that. Leave the doe behind. Let the artist, the botanist, the child remember the blood drops on the star, let them forget. Allow for impostors among constellations,

all benign, all shining.

100

The Mermaid Behind the Glass John F. Buckley and Martin Ott The fall of Atlantis is all our faults. We are glued to flood news, spontaneous gills, my own legs fused, mind swimming behind a screen that pulses and broods. No one remembers to feed the fish. We let them comingle with scruffy tritons with missing scales, neglecting our pets as we inhale The Tuna Whisperer. Lost surfers are occasionally caught in nets made of plastic rings and bags, and nothing stops The Sturgeon Surgeon from attempting to save a life or two. We are sluggish on coral couches, fins rooted in pudgier flesh. Swimming only to the fridge and back for fried krill puffs, we blame our bulk on omega-3 fatty acids. We all have a sense of drowning now, high-rise apartments brushing the sea bottom, the other world pale and brittle as love. A mermaid’s fate is to watch.

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Snowy Stanzas Changming Yuan

December As the sun sinks deeper every day Into the other side of the world The shadow is getting longer, darker Making our lives slant more and more Towards night, when nature Tries to balance yin and yang By covering each dark corner With white snowflakes Ever so softly, quietly As each twig frowns hard at twilight Why not give it smile and thus Book a space in heaven? January Standing alone At this coldest spot of the doorway You pause, wondering which door to Knock at, which to Push or pull So you can go inside A warm room where you know You cannot stay for the whole year Nor would you come out of the same door But which to enter: 102

The narrow door with a wide exit Or the wide one with a narrow exit? February Rolling, flowing, dripping From the palest memories of last year The melting snow stops moving But hung everywhere Like crystals Against the freezing fits of frantic winds With the moon always broken In this shortest month of the pearl No love can be purified No couple can enjoy a full honeymoon

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Natural Disasters Josefin ullberg

He sits on the veranda in an office chair, holding an x-rayed lung to the light as his neighbor moves a lawn mower into the kitchen and says through a cigarette: The floods are expected to be worse than â&#x20AC;&#x2122;74. On the wheeled out TV a man canoes a one way road, the images of untamed water, some guys drinking beers on top of a drunken house. Past the corner shopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s barricaded walls, the owner waves sandbag heavy, driving into a distant state. Even the possums, he replies, evacuate their uninsured homes. Here the wind is forcing through the narrow gaps of streets and structure, passing in voiceless hissings, stressing no syllables or names. Between one hand and another he weighs the x-ray on a scale of losses. And as unlocked bikes and addressed letters are dragged to the river rising like crab legs in mud, he watches the rain fall in glassy shadows, collapse into drops and spread along the white lines of x-rayed bones. While the palm trees bend

104

like grass and the rotary clotheslines shriek to the windâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s circular breathing, the oblivious lung inside the lining of his coat sings of nothing, only slightly out-of-tune to his neighborâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s low whistle.

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The Man with All the Answers a comic by Mik ael lopez and Olle Forsslรถf

In focus Kevin Barry

Breakfast Wine Kevin Barry

hey say it takes just three alcoholics to keep a small bar running in a country town and while myself and the cousin, Thomas, were doing what we could, we were a man shy, and these were difficult days for Mr Kelliher, licensee of The North Star, Pearse Street. ‘The next thing an ESB bill will come lording in the door to me,’ he said. ‘That could tip me over the edge altogether. Or wait until you see, the fucker for the insurance will arrive in. Roaring.’ He took the rag to the counter and worked the rag in small tight circles, worked it with the turn of the knot and the run of the grain, he was a man of precise small flourishes, Mr Kelliher, and these flourishes were a taunt to the world. Even in desperate times, they said, proper order shall be maintained. The Kelliher mouth, like generations of Kelliher mouths before it, was bitter, dry and clamped, and the small grey eyes were deranged with injustice. ‘I’ve no cover,’ he said. ‘My arse is hanging out to an extraordinary degree. I’m open to the fates. It’s myself and the four winds. You’ll see me yet, boys, with a suitcase, at the side of the road, and the long face on. The workhouse! That’s what they’ll have to get going again for the likes of me.’ The clock considered twelve and passed it by with a soft shudder, 118

as though it had been a close call. It seemed to be a fine enough day, out there beyond the blinds. Birds in the trees and flowers in the park and the first bit of warmth of the year. The torpid movement of late morning in the town, and the sunlight harsh in its vitality, as if it was only here to show the place up. ‘Nail me to a cross and crucify me,’ said Mr Kelliher, ‘and at least that way I’d go quick.’ The North Star was an intimate place, a place of dark wood and polished optics, with the radio tuned to the classical station for calm (it played lowly, very lowly) and the blinds let slants of light in and you’d see distant to the morbid hills, if you strained yourself. Myself and Thomas were sat there on the high stools. We were fine specimens of bile and fear and broken sleep. There was slow hungry slurping, and I finished what was before me. ‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’ ‘I would of course, Brendan.’ ‘Cuz?’ ‘I will so,’ said Thomas. Mr Kelliher never drank himself—not anymore—but he drank milky tea by the gallon, and a whistling kettle was kept in perpetual operation in the small private space adjoining the bar. Its whistle was a lonesome gull, or the wheeze of a lung, and it was part of the music of the house. Mr Kelliher attended to the stout. Each fresh glass he filled two sevenths shy of the brim, with the glass delicately inclined towards the pourer’s breast, so as the stout would not injure itself with a sheer fall, and he set them then, and there was the rush and mingle of brown and cream notes, and the blackness rising, a magic show you would never tire of. ‘Small industry in this country is being wiped out,’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Who are you telling?’ I said. ‘It’s the likes of us who toil and scrape, Brendan. We’re the ones 119

getting a clatter off the blunt end of a spade. Ignorance! That’s all you come up against around this place.’ ‘Shocking,’ I agreed. He removed our used glasses—averting his eyes from them, so decorous—and placed them in the neat dishwasher, where they would expect company. He filled to the top the fresh ones and with a curt nod put them before us and a note was slid across and we moved our lips wordlessly in thanks. ‘There are fellas in Leinster House would shame a brothel,’ he said. We had no women. It was an awful lack in our lives. Mothers, daughters, lovers, wives, we had none of these at all, not a one between us, because women were a premium in the county, and in truth we were hardly prizetakers. It was from this lack of women that we had turned into auld women ourselves. Daily we regaled each other with our ailments and complaints, we talked of changes in the weather, and strangers in the town. Nothing could occur in the town of an insignificance beyond our gossip. If a wall got a lick of paint, it would be remarked in The North Star. Mr Kelliher winced, and stretched a liver-spotted hand up behind himself to investigate a region of the upper back, and his eyes leapt to the ceiling, and he said: ‘Would you ever get a class of a cold pain out a lung?’ ‘Would you not mean a kind of a white heat, Mr Kelliher?’ ‘Precisely so, Brendan!’ ‘Searing,’ said Thomas. ‘Like a poker!’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Arra,’ I said, and we all three of us nodded in sad resignation.

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he North Star was discreetly situated in the town. You trailed down the steep decline of Russell Hill, passed Bord Gáis and Hair Affair, you kept your head down passing the guards, you moved away from the commerce and traffic of the town, you hung an abrupt left into a narrow, vague, nothing-much sort of a street, and this was Pearse Street, its dullness a measure of the low esteem that particular martyr was held in hereabouts. The North Star was the only action on Pearse Street, and sunlight breached this narrow gorge for just one hour a day but now was the hour and Mr Kelliher came out from behind the bar and he shut the blinds fully against it. He was a small man neatly hewn, and sallow, with impressively planed features, like the carved dark aztec of a cliff-face, and he was of indeterminate age, it wouldn’t surprise you if he was forty-three or seventy-four, and there was something of Charlie Chaplin in the swing-along, quick-stepping gait, but you wouldn’t mention it. ‘Turned out fairly nice, Mr Kelliher.’ ‘Pleasant enough looking, Brendan.’ ‘After the night we put down.’ ‘Sure the night was filthy altogether.’ He picked up the neatly placed beer mats from each of The North Star’s five zinc-topped tables, though they hadn’t been used, and he replaced them with fresh, which he dealt out with Vegas flourish. Stepped in behind the bar again, with a clearing of the throat, hmm-hmm, and it was the satisfaction of small rituals that emanated from him, though by now it was a weakish glow. ‘What way are they above?’ ‘Well, Mr Kelliher.’ ‘That’s good at least. Did you tell them Hourigan was gone to the wall?’ ‘I did.’

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‘They’d have sport from that?’ ‘They would, Mr Kelliher.’ ‘A very bleak situation.’ ‘I thought he had his head above water.’ ‘Indeed no.’ ‘Hard to have sympathy, all the same?’ ‘Same fella wouldn’t piss on you, Brendan.’ ‘The beard does nothing for him,’ said Thomas. The classical music succumbed to a news bulletin and there was talk of violent death, atrocities in Africa, oil shortages, a widow in Castleisland with lucky numbers for the Lottery, and we listened, keenly enough, for The North Star was at a remove from the world, certainly, but by no means cut off from it. ‘A sad, peculiar life, gentlemen?’ ‘To put it very mildly, Mr Kelliher.’ The stout was about its work. It was the third drink of the day, and the drinking would slow now to session pace—the dread of the morning had lifted, we had passed the hour of remorse, and we marched to the mellow afternoon. Even Thomas was starting to look fairly chipper. A strange rumbling then, like dogs going at each other in the distance, but it was internal, miserably, and I wasn’t sure if it was my own stomach or the cousin’s. Serious drinking, the drinking of a lifetime’s devotion, is hard physical labour. ‘You persevere despite it all, Mr Kelliher?’ ‘You never weaken, Brendan. Weaken and all is lost.’ It was due that the crossword of the Irish Times would put in an appearance, and the three of us would make light work of it, normally. Thomas would be an amazement to you. Sit there like a stone all the morning and then start throwing out words like ‘inimical’ and ‘hauteur’. But the crossword was left aside, for there was to be a disturbance this day in The North Star. The door opened up, and glamour stepped in. 122

Glamour carried itself with great elegance and ease. It was jewelled at the fingers and jewelled at the throat. It wore fine woolens and high leather boots and a green velvet cape, the texture such an excitement against machine-tanned skin. Glamour took onto a high stool beside us, and delicately arranged itself. ‘Howye, lads,’ she said. ‘What reds have ye on?’ The North Star was by no means inoculated against the charms of glamour, especially when it spoke with this whispery hoarseness, and Mr Kelliher was a flushed boy as he pressed into action. ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can only offer a meagre selection. But let’s see now, let’s see.’ He took down one each of the varieties of red wine he kept in the house, the little 33cl, glass-and-a-bit bottles, which myself and Thomas sometimes resorted to late in the evening, if the sheer volume of stout was threatening to overwhelm matters. The evenings we hit the firewater are as well left unremarked. ‘Really,’ said Mr Kelliher, ‘I should put you in the hands of these gentlemen. They’d be the experts.’ I nodded, shyly, and reached down to see if my voice would function, and it had a quiver and a quake but it emerged anyway. ‘The merlot isn’t a bad old drop, as it goes,’ I said. ‘A Chilean.’ ‘Oh?’ she said, and she took the bottle to examine it. She granted a familiar smile to me, and she crossed her long legs beneath the woolen folds. The electric rustling of nylons was heard, it went off like a crack of lightning in the premises, and a light sweat broke out on my forehead. ‘The pinot noir is bog standard, to be honest with you. It’d be fairly… flat, really. Of the three, I’d nearly go for the cabarnet. It’s not going to stand up and talk to you, it’s very much the usual, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s kinda…’ ‘Full and ripe?’ she said, with the mouth twisted slightly.

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‘You could say.’ ‘A very nice breakfast wine,’ said Thomas, you’d never know when he was going to come out with a quick one. She granted to him a slyer smile. ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said, and she took the bottle and unscrewed the top, the movement of her long fingers was quick and dizzying. Now jealousy was no stranger in the town. It was my own foul weather, a cold mist that surrounded me. But it’s a familiar old song, that one, you’d hear it in every public bar of the town, you’d hear it in all the low bars of Nicholas Street, and in the suede-smelling hush of the hotel’s lounge bar, you’d hear it in all the honky tonks of the Castle Walk. The radio announced that a complex frontal trough was moving in off the Atlantic. Good luck to it. ‘The sort of day,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t know would you want a coat on you or what. Seasons changing.’ ‘They haven’t much choice,’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Where are you from yourself?’ She named a western town, a place so far away that we hadn’t a picture at all of the fallings of life in that town, though we’d suspect them to be harsh. ‘And what brings you here?’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘A minor secondary road,’ she said, and winked him one, and he lit up like Christmas. She enquired about rental accommodation in the town, and I could sense stirrings the other side of me on a high stool. We related to her what possibilities there were. ‘Are you talking a night or a week or what?’ ‘You wouldn’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m the way I don’t know how a notion might turn in me. Did you ever get that way? Did you ever wake up and think, what about a turn on the heel? What about a sudden swerve?’ 124

She seemed carefully made up, at first glance, but a more considered examination, there in the convivial afternoon of The North Star, revealed the flaws and slips. The mascara had run a little at the eyes, and the lip gloss was a rush job, and this gave her a fraught quality. It hinted at drama that was by no means unwelcome, for the days were slow in The North Star, and the nights were only trotting after them. ‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’ ‘I would, Brendan.’ ‘Cuz?’ ‘Go on sure.’ ‘And yourself, miss?’ ‘Very kind,’ she said. Mr Kelliher smirked in the way that he has. ‘Very poor qualities of observation I would have to say, Brendan.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘This isn’t a miss we have,’ and he wriggled fingers in the air, and I caught it, belatedly, on the third finger of her left hand, the sparkler. She looked at it herself and mock-proudly held it for display. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m separated.’ A class of dizziness palpable from the high stool the other side of me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ whispered Mr Kelliher, decorous again after his cheeky intrusion. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s the way things work out sometimes.’ We nodded, the three men, sombre as owls. We nodded as though the cruel variables of love were hardly news to us. We nodded as though we’d each known heartbreak and the ache of a lost love, as though we’d each walked the Castle Walk, at four in the morning, in cold rain, with the collars turned up against a lonely wind. Oh what we wouldn’t have given for broken hearts. 125

‘A marriage is an old record,’ she said. ‘It’ll go around and around grand for years and then it gets so scratched it’s unlistenable.’ Stranger talk, this, and there was unease now at the counter of The North Star. Even before our stout was settled and served, she was making good progress on the second small bottle of cabernet. ‘Are ye farming, men?’ she said. ‘You’d hardly call it that,’ I said, ‘at this stage.’ ‘Site farmers!’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Don’t mind him,’ I said. ‘You take what’s going,’ she said. ‘A fool not to,’ I said. Certainly, these had been good years for us. The land of the vicinity wasn’t great, not by any stretch, but it had fine views of dreary hills, and the rivers were swollen with licey trout, and this was enough to draw people in. We sold them what space they wanted, having plenty to spare.

truck went past, rattling the neat stacks of glasses, and Mr Kelliher shut his eyes, briefly, in suffering, and he was seen to suppress a swear. ‘More of it,’ he said. ‘They’re using it as a rat run, d’you see? Since they got in the traffic calming up on the Castle Walk. Bastards of lorries cutting down all day, you’ll pardon my French. What way are ye over for traffic calming?’ ‘Measures are in place,’ she said. ‘But if you’re asking me if any good is being done?’ She shrugged. It was an expansive movement, performed, to let us know in the cheap seats that a wry puzzlement was signalled. She was a kind of woman not entirely unknown to us. In quietish towns, there are women with a great want for drama and heat, even if it’s only trouble that can bring it. Such a woman might often

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be the only throb of life in a place. We were stirred by her. Mr Kelliher’s mouth hung on its hinges and waves of emotion swept over him, as though she was a sacred daughter brought back from the wolves. Thomas, by the big red face on him, was clearly subject to notions himself. And I couldn’t wait to get home so as I could dream about her. ‘Take all the cars off the roads,’ she said. ‘All the trucks and all the jeeps. Build bonfires of the things and torch them. Watch them burn, wait for the tanks to blow. Storm the county councils and rip up the road plans. No more roundabouts and no more laybys. Anybody stepping anywhere near a vehicle of any mechanical description is put up against a wall and shot before night. Imagine it, lads—the world slows again to a human pace. We could saunter and stroll. How would that be?’ ‘A woman,’ said Thomas, ‘after my own heart.’ ‘Mind you,’ she said, and she held three fingers aloft, indicated with them our glasses, and winked for Mr Kelliher. ‘I was thankful for the car under me when I was putting distance between myself and Rhino Flynn.’ ‘Who?’ ‘My husband,’ she said. ‘And ye’re… separated now?’ ‘We are,’ she said. ‘Since about half four this morning.’ She drained what was left of the second cabernet, made a start on the fresh. From a wallet of fine snakeskin she placed a note on the table. ‘One yourself, sir?’ ‘Thanks, I won’t,’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘I haven’t drank in years.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘It wasn’t agreeing with me. A doctor put me on the spot and said I wouldn’t see forty.’

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‘And now you’ve seen it,’ she said, ‘has it been worth it?’ ‘Arguable,’ he said.

e went uncertainly into the afternoon. The classical station went into its period of great torpor, to the slowest dirges and dreamiest movements. Up top of the hill, the town could be heard to go about its Thursday business. Car doors slamming was the punctuation of the place. Soon enough, they’d let out from the primary school, and quick giddy footsteps would go past outside, and sing-song taunts in unbroken voices. We knew them all. We’d watch them grow taller and leave. The years come in, the years go out. The longer you’d sit and look at it, the life of the town would contract to almost nothing, to the merest glimpse of life, the tiniest crack of light against the black. It passes quickest in the slow places. ‘You’d hear him before you’d see him,’ she said. ‘Big old lunk. Big shit head on him. Powerful build of a man but a small child at the end of the day.’ ‘Would be often the way, missus.’ ‘You can call me Josie,’ she said, and the name was all her, it had carnival roll to it, and more drinks were arranged. ‘I don’t know would I have a Heineken?’ she said. ‘I have a throat on me but no, listen, I’ll stick with these. Grape or grain, never the twain.’ ‘Hard-won wisdom,’ I said. ‘Married at all yereselves, lads?’ she said. ‘I didn’t think so. Ye’re as well not. Less complications.’ ‘I could use complications,’ said Thomas. ‘Now!’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘That’s a ripe one, Tom.’ Thomas slugged off the high stool, he was embarrassed once the words slipped out, and he headed for the gents. She watched him over her shoulder, the tip of her tongue emerging between her lips. 128

‘What’s with the quiet man?’ she said. ‘The strong silent type,’ said Mr Kelliher. ‘Learned my lesson about them longo,’ she said. I felt a thrumming within myself, the heartbeat had quickened, and Mr Kelliher worked the rag with the turn of the knot and the run of the grain, and we were nervous until Thomas got back. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘Is it always this hectic?’ She crossed and uncrossed her legs, there was a crack of lightning, and the afternoon was in around me like redcoats with muskets primed, and I said: ‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’ ‘I would, Brendan.’ ‘Cuz?’ ‘Would you ever leave me live my fucking life?’ said Thomas. ‘He will, Mr Kelliher. Josie?’ ‘One for the high road,’ she said. Things settled again, and cream notes mingled with brown, and though I searched for the small talk that might work as lead to weight the balloon, there wasn’t need for it, because something had given away in Josie now: she showed herself more fully. ‘Strain in my neck from the car,’ she said. ‘Driving half the night on bad roads. But I had to get away from the other bastard. The poison got into the big fool and he couldn’t let me out of his sight. The next thing I know I’m on the floor of the garage tied down with flex.’ The schoolchildren passed by outside, high and excited, the sense of release, the daily fiesta of half past three, and the town’s noises would change and quicken with the afternoon, a particular agitation would surface, the rush and hubbub of it, people hurrying home to whatever was waiting, and normally at this time the pace of our drinking would quicken also. Often, it was the hour of the firewater. 129

‘This is what flex does,’ she said, and she shucked the cuffs of her sleeves to show the weals and the raised welts, blistered yellow and furious red, and soft consoling noises were made. Grip her gently in the darkness, pull her towards you: it would read like Braille. ‘Who were you talking to, he says. I seen you talking to him. Why were you talking to him…’ She shrugged it away. ‘I should have seen it coming.’ She finished what was left of her drink, and she regarded us with great fondness and there was an intimation that there was shared history to come, that she too would become a familiar of the premises. ‘It’s been something else, fellas,’ she said, and she carried herself to the door on careful heels, not a single step was sloppily placed. ‘I open at eleven,’ said Mr Kelliher, discreetly. ‘Good to know,’ she winked for him once more, and left. So it was that The North Star was saved. With its five zinc-topped tables in the afternoon gloom, and the pendant flags of Tipperary, the gold and the blue, and its three high stools placed so by the bar. The turn of the dark wood’s knot, the run of its grain. The shine of the optics, the calender, the lulling music always played. The North Star is immune to all winds and complex troughs. The North Star is a safe haven. From There Are Little Kingdoms, Stinging Fly Press, 2007.

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Kevin Barry is an Irish writer whose short story collection There Are Little Kingdoms won The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and his latest, Dark Lies The Island, won the Edge Hill Prize. He also won The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. His first novel, City of Bohane, won the last International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize in 2013. He is also a stage and screen writer.

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Interview with Kevin Barry paul mcveigh

mcveigh I wanted to ask you about your beginnings as writer, your journey. Did you have a philosophy when you started out? Was there a plan? Or was it more of an organic process? BARRY I was working a freelance journalist in my 20s. And doing fine. Writing reviews and arts interviews. For good newspapers, The Irish Times, The Guardian, but I wasn’t getting happy. I knew there was a part of my brain that I wasn’t using and I should be using. I was writing bits of fiction but not in a very disciplined way. I’d be writing when I crawled in from a nightclub at three in the morning, sentences that seemed like genius at the time but that wouldn’t stand up to the light of day. Mid-to-late 20s I started getting serious about it, I suppose. I knew I had ability and it struck me that what was required was a huge amount of work. Weirdly, with short stories, writers respond to the forums available for their work and I was on my first ever trip to the US in, I think, 1998 and I remember being in a big book shop outside Seattle and seeing all these shelves of small literary journals from all over the US and flicking through them and thinking “Wow, there are places where short stories are published,” and I started searching them out and 133

just because these tiny audiences were out there I started sending my work to places like North Dakota and getting them published, like the Adirondack Review and places like that. I was attempting various dead novels we all have at home but the first pieces that I could get the sense that they were working out were the short stories. I in no way see it as an apprentice form for a novel. I think that short stories are harder, in some ways, than the novel. MCVEIGH You were drawn there. BARRY Yes, and I think that Irish writers are. I have no idea why? I could give you some bullshit about the oral tradition, but I have no idea. But the evidence is there. We’re drawn to it. We’re good at them. For me, short stories, I write them out of impatience. I want to get a finished thing on the desk, good or bad, just something that’s done. I write scripts a lot of the time now as well. And novels, there’s years that go into them. Scripts less so. If a story works well I can be finished in a couple of days, if it’s going well. Not all stories do. I write loads and only a very small proportion will go out into the world. I’d say one in ten or twelve. Most are shit you know. You just have to write enough to get the good ones. MCVEIGH Going back, you developed a relationship with The Stinging Fly who published your first collection. How did that come about? BARRY They sponsored the Davy Byrne’s Short Story Prize in 2004, which I was short-listed for, and Declan Meade of Stinging Fly had or-

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ganized. And through that they started publishing a few stories in the magazine. MCVEIGH Which isn’t easy. I read somewhere Declan turns down 95% of submissions. BARRY It’s very tough now. He turns down named writers all the time. And anyway, after publishing a couple of stories, Declan, in his very casual kind of way said, “If you had another eight or nine we do could do a little book.” I had about nine and wrote and another five or six on the spur of that. There Are Little Kingdoms has done amazingly. It keeps going. It sells. It seems to have legs. MCVEIGH When you look back, can you see a progression from that collection to the new one, Dark Lies the Island? Do you see a different writer? BARRY I don’t think there’s much in it in terms of quality. I think the key difference is that the first book has stories in from over seven years and the second one is over two or three years. I think in the second one therefore the recurring themes are more evident and the first one is a bit more disparate and kind of spread out. Interestingly, there’s a collection of stories coming out in Italian in about a year’s time and they’ve taken stories from either one, a selection from the two books.

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MCVEIGH The Greatest Hits. The Best of Barry. BARRY Kind of, and they work well together. There were 5 years between the collections and you’re not going to be putting one out every two years or something. Especially the way I write, in the most uneconomical way, where you throw most of it away and you have two or three you’re happy with after a year. MCVEIGH That’s a lot of ideas. And a lot of material thrown away. BARRY What I hope is that readers would read them slowly, books of short stories, not read two or three a night. I think a short story is an intense prose experience so I urge readers to spread them out a bit over a few weeks. MCVEIGH Of course, from your second collection, you had the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award-winning story “Beer Trip to Llandudno.” What was that like winning something that big at that time in your career? BARRY It was fantastic. It was a big chunk of change. It was also a week or two before the second collection came out so I couldn’t have timed it better. It picked a lot more coverage than it would of done. Prizes are important. They keep books and they keep writers in the centre of the conversation. Which is where we have to keep them, to keep these going because it’s tough now for books and writers, 136

they’re being squeezed from all sides. It’s very healthy in Ireland, in lots of ways writers are well supported, people read a lot, people are open to stuff. I think in the UK it’s more difficult. People are being pushed a lot. Bookshops are taking in fewer books by new writers. It’s getting hard for new writers to come through, in the UK and the US. Ireland has quite a good set up I think. It’s very important to not get complacent about it. MCVEIGH I think your second collection is darker in many respects. BARRY I think possibly so, yeah. MCVEIGH And I also found a lot of lonely people, a lot of lost people, whole towns that felt desolate and depressed, where people seem to have no choice but to turn to drink or turn on each other, or turn in on themselves. I wondered where that view of world comes from? BARRY Drama comes out of unhappiness really, someone, I think it was Iris Murdoch, said, “Happiness writes white. It doesn’t show up on the page.” Happy people are very boring and very dull. (Laughs). A lot of characters and you’re absolutely right, in the second collection are pushed to extremities, and are being squeezed and are struggling, very evidently in the title story for example, and it’s very interesting how we react when we’re in extreme situations as well. I come and go from realism as a writer, a lot of them aren’t strictly realistic, so something like “The Fjord of Killary” is an end-of-the-world, rising tide, apocalypse. Where I’m always inter-

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ested working as a writer is just out on the edge, on the cusp of believability, so you read it and you say “Ach, no, come on...” but still just keep going along with it. And trying to sell that to the reader. I like the idea of the writer as kind of trickster figure, just about believable and drag them along. MCVEIGH I think that works well, the humour and playfulness, if you are talking about these lost people, it helps lift the difficult or heavy subject matter. But it’s not just the people that are dark, their environment is too. I was struck that the buildings, the landscape itself - for example, when you talk about mountains nearly every mention is tense, foreboding, they’re hated by the people who live there or visit. For the characters in your stories the environment seems to be against them. Is there something about Ireland itself in there? BARRY I think the sense of place … very often my stories start with a place in mind. One of my more esoteric beliefs as a writer is that human feelings settle into the stones of the place. There are happy towns and there are sad towns. And there are happy mountains and sad mountains. And the story I’ll read at the Word Factory is called “Ox Mountain Death Song” which was in The New Yorker last year, and that came from cycling around the Ox Mountains near where I live in County Sligo. And anytime I’ve cycled through, I’ve got this eerie, weird fucking buzz, like, a really strange feeling about the place. It’s very austere. It’s all wet, miserable and windy. I go out a lot on the bike and every time I went through it I’d think there’s a story here surely. It’s a perfect landscape for something and it did eventually. There’s a story in my first collection Burn The

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Bad Lamp, which is purely a love letter to the city of Cork where I spent a lot of my 20s and I absolutely loved the place and I was bit homesick for it when I wrote the story. And Liverpool when I lived there, “Beer Trip To Llandudno,” which won the big prize, that comes out of the time when my wife was lecturing there and we lived in a big flat, it was very nice but the heating wasn’t good so in the winter we went to pub a lot just for warmth. MCVEIGH You love pubs. In your work. BARRY Yeah well, they’re good places to eavesdrop and sometimes as a story writer you’re gifted. One night I was in a bar, it’s called The Lion Tavern in Liverpool, and saw this photocopied stack and it was the Beer Club Newsletter. And there were reports on recent outings. And as a story writer you’re thinking “Gift! Absolute gift!” When you’re handed a story like that it’s rare and you know straight away it’s going to work. MCVEIGH We’ve talked about the humour, the dark places and the edge of believability in your writing but there’s also stories of real tenderness and sadness of characters connecting or missed connections, like in “Across the Rooftops.” BARRY In some ways my idea of a story is quite traditional. Centred around these cusp moments on a life where people change and it’s never quite evident at the time and maybe ten/twelve years later, you look back and think “Wow! Things could have really gone the

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other direction at that time,” and you didn’t see it. It’s those kind of moments when people change. Those often pivot points in a life that only come clear with a bit of distance. That often makes a story. MCVEIGH Your novel, The City of Bohane, the strongest character in there, for me, was the city itself. The creation of Bohane is a real achievement, it’s so detailed, the streets/areas, the tribes that live there. And wider into its history, fashions. How did you go about creating something like that? BARRY It all starts by the way people talk. If you get the voices then you can get everything about the people. You can open out their place from that. I hope Bohane is its own imaginary city out there in a vague Ireland-type place. The speech of it comes from working class speech in Limerick and Cork and it is a unique take on the English language and it’s never shown up in Irish literature much. Those communities weren’t in the way of producing literature. Most of what I wanted to do with City of Bohane was have a good time and have fun and I had a ball. I had attempted novels where there was a lot of pacing up and down and hand wringing. It struck me, belatedly, that if I’m not having fun at this end of the process maybe the reader isn’t having much fun at the other end. It was great fun to do all the voices and describe all the clothes. The great thing about writing a novel is there’s no budget restrictions. I can have vast gang fights and costumes changes and then love triangles. Someone described it recently as an opera. And that’s very much what it is. It’s Mack the Knife or West Side Story.

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MCVEIGH I saw it as a Western. BARRY It’s very much a Western. MCVEIGH There’s the Sheriff of the lawless town and his old enemy returns, whose old girlfriend is now the Sheriff’s wife. Also there’s a mafia/ gangster feeling with the gangs/tribes fighting over the city. All American story influences in those respects. BARRY I suppose as a writer you are a magpie and you’re looking for anything that shines. So there is a whole stew of influences, a lot from what I would have been watching, Deadwood, The Sopranos and The Wire. 70’s trashy gangster films I would have loved as a kid like The Warriors and The Wanderers. And what you’re listening to as music. I love late 70s dub reggae Trojan Records, that came into it. All of these things fed into it. You hope that if there’s enough of these influences, maybe you’ll meld them together and make your own thing out of it. I think the city works—as a city – and when you’ve built that piece of real estate then it’s always tempting to think that at some further point “Will I go back out there?” So maybe somewhere down the line – certainly not the next novel – but maybe I’ll be brave enough to go back to see what’s happening in Bohane. MCVEIGH And did you come down on a reason why you think this novel was different than the dead novels you referred to? What was different this time?

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BARRY I didn’t have a publishing contract or anything but the morning I started it I knew it would be published – no doubt. I was “Yeah, this is what I’m supposed to be writing at this point in my career.” It was kind of the realization that it was set in the future, which I didn’t know till I half way through the first chapter but that really freed it - that it didn’t have to any be true to the actual world out there and I could just invent and make it wild. I wrote the first draft very quickly, in about 13 weeks, because I knew it was a big kind of language performance and what I wanted was a torrential kind of rush “Bleeaah” onto the page, you know. So that was a very tense fucking experience where I was clinically nuts for about 3 months writing it. And then I went slower for about six-seven months putting more story and structure in there and twisting the characters but initially my big thing was to get it down quick because I wanted that kind of flow for the language and I wanted a rhythm to it. And “it’s a quare one” as they say, Bohane, it very much has to be read with the ears, you have to listen to what they are saying. I was very keen to make readers work a bit at the beginning; it takes 50 or 60 pages, I think. We’ve gotten lazier, I think. There was a time when you’d happily pick up a Russian novel and spend 90 pages struggling with the huge cast of characters and the whole world and then suddenly you get that moment when you’re in! And you can’t stop and you get the sense that you’ve earned the book, if you like. And I think that’s something that’s has very much changed because of online and so forth that novelists are expected to get to the reader much more quickly. You have to get him in five or ten pages, which is hard to do. MCVEIGH Writers are under pressure to market their writing or curtail it, make it shorter, smaller cast, faster, funnier. 142

BARRY I think it’s important to keep you attention within the peripheries of the desk and everything else will follow from that. Not thinking, “Will this be published? Will this be bought?” because that’s inviting disaster. I think just think about the story and what’s happening on your desk and if you’re doing it right all else will follow from that. MCVEIGH You use humour a lot and it seems to really capture readers. There are those of the opinion that by writing humorously you’re not taken seriously as a writer. I was wondering what you thought about using humour, how do you value it and what you think people’s perceptions of it are? BARRY I think you’re absolutely right. I think in some quarters there’s a perception that if it’s funny then it can’t be serious. And I believe very much to the contrary. As a reader, a lot of my very favourite stuff is at some level funny, even my favourite novelist would be someone like Saul Bellow, who is fundamentally a comic writer, and Philip Roth. Hilary Mantel is in many ways a comic writer, there’s a lot of other things going on, but they are funny as well. For me, comedy is a very natural human mode, a very natural form, it tends to be how we get through life, in the ‘if you didn’t laugh you’d cry’ sense. It’s natural for me to write in a comic mode. I’m troubled by the term comic fiction or comic novel, in the BoomTish one-liners and zingers and I hope I don’t do that. And there’s nothing worse than intended comedy, trying too hard to be funny, it has to be sprung naturally.

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MCVEIGH From situation and character. BARRY And very often comedy for me comes from dialogue, what people are saying to each other, little power struggles that are going on. MCVEIGH Certainly in Northern Ireland, I think humour is our weapon of choice. It’s a sword we swing when we want to cut people down, so it has a lot of power too. There’s a lot of humour in Irish writing as a whole, there’s a lot of darkness too and I was thinking about it almost as though humour is a natural resource of Ireland. Do you agree and that perhaps, with Irish writers, that it’s in our DNA? BARRY People talk about a great tradition of writing but there’s actually several different traditions. There’s a seriously mischievous tradition, a really inventive one, that goes back to people like Flann O’Brien and back to Jonathan Swift and up through to Joyce – he was funny in his day. Beckett, in his way, wrote dark comedy, and I think definitely too, with Irish people, there’s a natural kind of gallows humour and a real, dark, dark, dark, dark humour. “Laughter in the dark,” as Nabokov used to call it. And certainly I hope that comes through in my own work. MCVEIGH In your introduction to Town and Country, the collection of new Irish short stories you edited for Faber, you say you sent out letters to numerous authors asking them to contribute to the anthology. Were they writers you’d met along the way or whose work you admired or... 144

BARRY Just as a reader really, I suppose. One of the things I’d wanted to do with the anthology was to not just go for obvious short story writers, so there’s a lot of people in there who wouldn’t necessarily be the first thing you thought of when you saw their names. So people like Paul Murray who’s very much a novelist, Michael Harding is known best as a newspaper columnist and an actor in Ireland, I always thought he was an amazing writer. For the last few years I’ve been reading this brilliant young blogger based down in Galway/Claire called Lisa McInerney and I heard on the grapevine that she was writing fiction and I thought “Let’s try her and see what comes in,” you know, and it was really exciting. And there are a few of what you might call bankers in there, I suppose, short story specialists, like Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. You know you’re going to get good stuff in and Dermot Healy is going to send you really good stuff. It was very exciting just to see what this motley crew would send to me. It was really good fun to see the various approaches and ways of attacking a short story. In a way, short story, as a phrase, or as a description. I increasingly like short fiction better. Short story still conjures up an image of something well made, a story with an epiphany in the second last paragraph and I think there are very different ways of attacking a story that are evident in this book. MCVEIGH Not all these stories are set in Ireland. Or by obviously Irish writers. BARRY No it’s quite interesting so Julian Gough is coming in from Berlin, Greg Baxter who is an honorary Irishman. He’s a Texan really but

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he was in Dublin long enough to gain status (laugh) as honorary Irishman. Greg is also in Berlin. Molly McCloskey is back now. I was dealing with Molly for the US. And geographically the stories are spread around quite a bit. We are a race of people that shifts around quite a bit. MCVEIGH I was looking through the bios and I couldn’t see a Northern Irish writer. BARRY Is there not? Oh Jesus Christ. MCVEIGH Being from Belfast I was like “Hold on...” BARRY Oy, oy, oy! Glenn Patterson will kill me. There’ll be trouble now. Oh Jesus! (He grabs me copy of the anthology and scans the authors) That’s shocking. MCVEIGH Did you notice any recurring themes, concerns ... threads woven through the collection? BARRY A sense of displacement actually. We were just talking about this spread of geographic locations. That sort of ‘home’ feeling, you know. A lot about Ireland and England. A strange interdependence between the two places and kind of love/hate, sustaining some kind of, at times, belligerent relationship between the two countries. Yes, just... movement and displacement came through

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quite strongly in some of the stories. Greg Baxter’s, Dermot’s story as well. But what I was looking for rather than recurring themes or whatever, is what I’m always after as reader, intensity you know, I want a seriously fucking intense experience when I’m reading a short story. And intensity can take many different forms. It might be comic intensity. It can be a very sad story and intensity of feeling, so that’s what I’m after and there’s some intense motherfuckers in this book. MCVEIGH I noticed a difference in the stories by the male and female writers in the collection. Did you feel that? Not only in subject matter but in form. I felt that by-in-large the women writers told stories. The men seemed to be more playful or experimental, with structure, and language, and therefore more challenging. It didn’t seem that story was necessarily their main drive. BARRY I think that’s a very reasonable response to it. There are some very serious prose stylists in there so with someone like the great Desmond Hogan you are going to get a seriously intense prose performance and it terms of storytelling there’s a story there but you have to work, to go with it and dig it out. I think he’s an incredible writer and I’m really thrilled and honoured to have a piece from him in the book. It’s a mad generalisation I know but I find that female writers can be very internal, at the soul, an intensity of feeling and maybe men are inclined to go for a more broader, open sweep kind of a thing. MCVEIGH One last thing. Reading live has become a big thing, in Ireland as

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well as here in the UK, and you have a bit of a reputation. People have said to me “Oh, I heard read in Cork and I’ll never forget it...” It’s obviously part of you. BARRY I’m kind of frustrated actor, I work a little bit in the theatre as well so, I enjoy it. And there’s absolutely no reason why writers should be performing. And it’s unfair. A lot or writers hate to read their work. I get very nervous, every time, but you have to get the nerves to do it well. That’s your juice. Your nervous energy. I’m theatrically inclined. So I perform them and I like to do it. It gets you out of the house.

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contributors Zuo You is a Chinese poet based in Xi’an. He is hearing-impaired and can only speak a few simple words. Zhu Jian is a Chinese poet particularly known for his vivid short poems. He is an organizer of Chang’an Poetry Festival. Liang Yujing is a lecturer at Hunan University of Commerce. Publications include Acumen, Litro, Wasafiri, Weyfarers, Modern Poetry in Translation, Boston Review, Westerly. “The Hotel” and “Horary Chart” first appeared in Mascara Literary Review, “The Horror of a Bookstore Owner” in Cutthroat, and “The Skull” in Asia Literary Review. Kate North’s novel, Eva Shell, was published in 2008 by Cinnamon Press and her poetry collection, Bistro, in 2012. She teaches at Cardiff Metropolitan University and edits for Iota Magazine. (katenorth.co.uk) Maria Freij is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kristianstad and a Social Researcher at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Blue Dog, TEXT, AJFS, and Softblow. Her book of poems is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann. Douglas Cole teaches at Seattle Central College. He is the advisor for Corridors. He won the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry, a Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House and the “Picture Worth 500 Words” contest by Tattoo Highway. Stephen Lynch was born in Dublin, but currently lives in China. His work has appeared in Metazen, The Londonist and Marco Polo. He is the co-editor of The Red Line Magazine (www.overtheredline.com). John F. Buckley and Martin Ott’s previous collaboration Poets’ Guide to America (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2012) features poems published in more than forty journals and anthologies. The second volume is the television-themed The Yankee Broadcast Network, and they are working on a third, American Wonder, about superheroes and supervillains. Ha Kiet Chau teaches art and literature in San Francisco. She also received nominations for Best New Poets (Ploughshares 2011) and Best of the Net (Flutter Poetry Journal 2012). Her chapbook, Woman, Come Undone, is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press.

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Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is the author of Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking and South Bronx Breathing Lessons, and the editor of an international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. Tom Boswell is a writer, photographer and community organizer in Wisconsin. His manuscript, Midwestern Heart, won the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award in 2012. In February 2014, he won the Glass Mountain poetry contest judged by Tony Hoagland. Francine Rubin is the Associate Director of the Learning Center at SUNY Purchase College whose chapbook Geometries was published by Finishing Line Press. Rubin has poetry in Anomalous, Fringe, Ozone Park, Pank, and Rougarou, among others. Changming Yuan, 7-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Landscaping (2013), grew up in rural China, holds a PhD in English, and currently tutors in Vancouver, where he co-publishes Poetry Pacific. Allen Qing Yuan, the author of Traffic Light (2013), currently attends UBC and co-publishes Poetry Pacific with Changming Yuan in Vancouver. Allen has had poetry appearing in more than 70 literary publications across 16 countries. John Sibley Williams is the author of Controlled Hallucinations and six poetry chapbooks. He is the winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. He is the editor of The Inflectionist Review, co-director of the Walt Whitman 150 project, and Marketing Director of Inkwater Press. Mikael Lopez mostly writes scripts for comics and films, occasionally poetry, and spends a disproportionate amount of time on details that no one will ever, ever notice or care about. He claims no nationality. Olle Forsslöf is an artist/illustrator based in Stockholm, where he runs a small press PEOW! Studio. Josefin Ullberg writes poetry, fiction, and edits non-creative writing. She is formerly an Australian resident of five years and literature student at University of Queensland.

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Rae Joyce is writer and artist living in Auckland. Ieva Krivickaitė’s works have appeared in various Lithuanian publications as well as St Petersburg Review, Ishaan Literary Review, The Travelling Poet Zine and others. She is graduating from the University of Glasgow this year with an MA in Comparative Literature. Jody Azzouni, a professor at Tufts University, has stories recently published in AQR, The Literary Review and Passages. For more information visit Azzouni.com. Sarah Vallance is an Australian living in Hong Kong. She has work forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review and Cutbank Literary Journal. Prognosis is the first chapter of her memoir. Meho Mahmutovic studied law in Mostar, Bosnia, worked for the radio i currently working as a lawyer. Photography is his hobby. Sarah Ann Winn lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Her poems appear in San Pedro River Review, Nassau Review, Portland Review, Ishaan Literary Review and others. Visit her at http://bluebirdwords.com or follow her @blueaisling. Pernilla Jansson is an aspiring illustrator with a penchant for Americana iconography, archetypes of femininity and candy pastel hues. She is studying Professional English at Stockholm University. Andy Turner is working on his PhD at Bath Spa University, which is a fictional account of the lives of residents and staff in a home for the deaf and deaf-blind. Paul McVeigh’s short stories have been published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He is the Deputy Editor at Word Factory, the UK’s leading short story salon and is curating the first London Short Story Festival in June. Rafiki Ubaldo is a journalist and photographer. He was born and grew up in Rwanda and now lives in Sweden. Patrik Widmark is a photographer raised in Stockholms archipelago. He loves spontaneity in his work and avoids all rules.

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