Two Thirds North 2015

2015

in this issue

JILL JONES KEVIN HART CATE KENNEDY MARK A XELROD

TWO THIRDS NORTH

2015

TWO THIRDS NORTH 2015

SENIOR EDITORS

PUBLISHER

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Paul Schreiber, Adnan Mahmutović Department of English, Stockholm University & Cinnamon Press Cassie Gonzales, Loren Francis, Oskar Callin, Denise Ask Nunes, Meriam Sahar, Elisa Baiguini, Veit G:son Berg, Adam Kilic, Nuno Berkeley Coter, Regina Madalik, Carlos Pereira, Magdalena Szybek, Jose Alejandro Perez del Cid

ISBN 978-1-909077-98-0 ISSN 2001-8452 (PRINT) ISSN 2001-8460 (ONLINE) Cover art by Allen Forest.

Photo of Cate Kennedy by Paul McVeigh.

CONTENTS Editor’s Foreword, Paul Schreiber

6

LIMITED TIME The Woodland Chapel, Jill Jones 10 Griefbites, Kenneth Pobo 11 Neighbors, David Stallings 12 Looking at Six Mile Creek, Robert Kendrik 13 Jesus Dario, Loren Francis 15 Prologue to Prometheus, or Fragments from a Shorter Work, 30 Michael Mirolla LOVE & THE BODY POLITIC And what if it isn’t, Lucy Durneen 43 Political Ad, Benjamin Schmitt 52 Blues, Kevin Hart 54 Lovers at the Museum, Enaiê Azambuja 55 Prayer, Benjamin Schmitt 56 Return from Salt Pond, Catherine McNamara 58 Café Strindberg, Mark Axelrod 67

TR ANSLATIONS & CROSSINGS The Prisoner, Zhu Jian A Letter in the Bottle, Zuo You A New Alphabet, Jonathan Greenhause The Problem of Evil, Kevin Hart Voyage, Enaiê Azambuja Journey Breaks, Photographs by Annette Willis A — B, Isaac Alvidrez

72 74 76 78 80 83 94

WHY NOT LOOK The Great Sea of Wieners, Vincent Cavalieri 118 Psalm of Abraxas, Joe Nicholas

120 Room with a View at Lake Ohrid, Bradley R. Strahan 122 On Another Rainy Day, Changming Yuan 123 Walls (England & Wales), Bradley R. Strahan 124 Streetlights to Acahualinca, Timothy Dodd 125 The Man Who Grew Wings, Sunil Sharma 126 Tomb Sweeping, Rachelle Escamilla 134 Itinerary, Hooman Azizi 136 Welles’ Four Men in a Boat, Illustrations by Allen Forest 141 I the Same Sorrow, Jill Jones 148 REMIND ME Evidence, Jill Jones 156 Four Frogs: a parallel poem, Changming Yuan 157 Fillets, Robert Joe Stout 158 Lilla Mamma, Pernilla Jansson 165 The Sorrowing Genealogist as Method Actor, Ian C. Smith 166

The Shadow Field, Jeffrey Alfier 168 The Other Sister, Angela Sherlock 170 Harbor Town Monograph, Jeffrey Alfier 182 Turns, Jill Jones 184 IN FOCUS: CATE KENNEDY Cold Snap, Cate Kennedy 186 Interview with Cate Kennedy, Paul McVeigh 199 REVIEW ESSAY The Savage Dinosaurs of the North: A Review of Cyril Dabydeen’s play a song somebody, Jose Alejandro Perez del Cid

216

Contributors 224

Editor’s Foreword

“I

am constantly getting somewhere. There is always a distance,” writes Isaac Alvidrez in his essay “A—B.” Though he is suggesting the vacillating movement and identity of a Mexican-American crossing and recrossing the border, he is also describing the paradoxical condition of writing. The writer, or the poet, struggles to say that precise thing, discover the transcendent metaphor that will call up the unnamable feeling or experience that is so essential to life. And each poem, image and story gets us somewhere, someplace new, often somewhere fascinating. But there remains a distance, and a need for a new voice, a new poem or translation of our experiences.

This constant oscillation, this incessant process of translation within and across borders, whether poetic or cultural, continues as a central theme and interest to us at Two Thirds North. We have two translations this year, of poems by Zhu Jian and Zuo You, but more importantly, this year we return to translations that come with perspective shifts or cultural crossings, from California to Guangzhou, from South Australia to Stockholm, from England to Accra, from Tasmania to Britain, from China to Vancouver, from the US to Japan. Two Thirds North 2015 brings to this Scandinavian crossroad the literary and artistic voices of writers from five of the inhabited continents, and imaginative realms that include all six.

In “Itinerary,” the Iranian-Swedish poet Hooman Azizi describes the efforts of a man who tries to carry the whole world of his daily and imaginary walks to a hospitalized 6

and bed-ridden wife. There is a rich Latin American imagination in this year’s submission selections, from the poetry of Brazilian Enaiê Azambuja to a review of GuyanaCanadian Cyril Dabydeen’s play a song somebody, to stories set in Nicaragua or crossing the Mexican and US border.

At the same time, there is an unusual antipodal density to the collection this year, with a number of writers from Australia, including Jill Jones, who has been our first poet-in-residence at Stockholm University’s English Department. This year’s featured fiction writer is Cate Kennedy with her story “Cold Snap” and an interview by Paul McVeigh. We have poems and fiction by Australian transplants Kevin Hart and Catherine McNamara, as well as a series of images by the noted Australian photographer Annette Willis.

Regardless of the transnational fields of imagination and creativity here, certain universal themes keep coming back to be reworked, as they must: love’s ineluctable call, its politics and often vicious disappointments, death and grief in life’s limited time; memories against loss, the struggle for identity across cultures and borders, and the poetically universal theme of the power of seeing.

Tasmanian poet, Ian C. Smith asks in his poem, “How long their journey before the vanishing point?” For the writer, the journey continues with each new work which, as Maurice Blanchot suggests, puts her or him aside to continue that work elsewhere, to attempt a new translation “in the space opened by creation.” If there is a vanishing point, here is where “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest,” as Wallace Stevens writes. Here, “In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

Paul Schreiber 7

LIMITED TIME

The Woodland Chapel JILL JONES

Maybe death smells like pine needles and tar to the living, maybe only roofs pray and eventually everything falls you go out in a long boat, burning being alive is a representation of living you can taste everything in your last meal nothing is next, you can’t see it maybe you remember it like clouds, but all these vapours will be unmade, like the universe, this one or any other one the utilitarian rows are no more eternal or more useful than porticos, or burnt viscera names, dates, and signs so the golden angel dances at the chapel entrance like any plastic angel, the wood-worn columns rot near the stone paving if you could cross the water forever you would but the water is rising here and dying there, it all goes in a wave a breeze in time, a time like now you go out in a long moment, burning Skogskyrkogürden, Stockholm 10

Griefbites KENNETH POBO My dad, 88, tells me he attended an online funeral on Wednesday, a cousin’s wife, “a fine person in every way.” Grief pulled an electronic curtain apart so he could sit with the others 3000 miles away. The wake began at 1:00pm EST, before his ping pong game in the retirement center rec room.

He finished his ice cream while scrolling through remembrances, one of which he wrote. No funeral parlor smell, no sound of too-tight shoes walking up to the family and expressing sorrow. A click closed the curtain, the screen dark. Mourning slipped between keyboard keys.

11

Neighbors DAVID STALLINGS Some I know—the lady who formed our raw milk pool, or over there, my daughter’s friend, killed in a car crash after soaking in a mountain hot spring.

They and other dead folk occupy the public park next door, plaques in their memory attached to benches, trees, gazebos—unseen by soccer players and joggers.

They make good company this foggy dawn— at one with chorus frogs, red-winged blackbirds, the great blue heron who stalks pond’s edge, seeing, stabbing.

12

Looking at Six Mile Creek ROBERT KENDRIK No fish from the creek today. Even the mudcat refuse a night crawler speared on a hook, suck what clings to the bottom instead. Behind me, a groundhog shimmers though weeds, supple & bright as a girl’s hair in summer. She may be split open tomorrow, glistening white entrails curled on the asphalt, blood turning dark in the sun. Picked up with plastic gloves & burned as biological waste, her dirt-crusted brood in the nest.

Son or daughter, my kid would have been nineteen this month.

If Stephanie has a child now, I don’t know. Lives in Virginia. Did. My line drops slack, the float lying still in the water.

13

GÜL BILGE HAN

Jesus Dario LOREN FR ANCIS I

L

eonard and I would joke that Todd Bogie had the smallest head we had ever seen. It was as if it never fully recovered from the vagina smushing at birth.

It bobbled like the largest of heads, giving Bogie an air of almost inhuman tenderness. An innocence pervaded everything that Bogie did, as if his tiny head taught him that nothing lasts very long. As the rest of us stood stiff in our Russian Orthodox cassocks, Bogie’s head would wobble out its humility in the incense-smoked air of the church.

The weekly touch football matches were held on the only flat, green area on the campus of our little seminary in Crestwood, on the outskirts of New York City. Leonard and I were the best; Bogie, much less so. The sun was an obstacle one particular Sunday after the morning homilies and various long-standing events. The details don’t matter so much, but the denouement does: Leonard and I rolling around on top of each other at the end zone by the pitiful creek. He had two-hand grabbed more than two-hand touched me, and I lashed back and barreled my way through Leonard and across the imaginary goal line. I felt momentarily triumphant rather than ashamed. Leonard felt differently, pushing me over from behind. There were devilish words sacrificed into the sacred air of the seminary 15

as we worked out our salvation on the ground. Leonard was strong and I was bruised, but no amount of ice or heat would soothe the sting of watching Bogie put down the football on the one yard line and walk away, the inflated, stitched pig skin wobbling to stillness on the sunny grass.

Leonard and I made up, emotionlessly, the next night when we leaned against each other, imperceptibly relieving one another of the tedious weight of Father Tom’s long homily. In the Russian Orthodox Church, everything is done standing. Leonard and I joked that the sheer difficulty of enduring this particular strand of the Christian religion surely guarantees its validity. The longstanding must please the Father.

The next time Leonard and I wrestled, Bogie joined in.

We were a couple of beers into a Friday evening in Nyack, Leonard five or six. The waters of the Hudson called to us. The cooling, foggy air drifted over the sea wall. As we approached the stone embankment, I signaled to Bogie to nudge Leonard into the water before he’d fully derobed. I was sure the motion and angle of Bogie’s head formed an affirmative, and, conscience assuaged, I did. But Leonard was fast and got a hold of my wrist. I toppled over him into the black water. My misfortune cancelled out his and the whole event turned playful when Bogie launched himself onto us with a guttural roar I didn’t think him capable of. We rolled into the water, deeper and deeper, until the sand disappeared from our feet, and nothing mattered but the feeling of skin on wet skin, of getting a good, deep breath in between the plungings. We were suspended then, taken out of history in the dark blue water, somewhere in between children and adult. For a moment, I pictured us from underneath, three thrashing figures, gurgling laughter, the silhouettes black and playful in the remaining light of the day.

16

II

B

ogie and I touched down in a storm at night. It was raining hard and the runway in Managua was leery and puddled as the 747 insisted itself upon it. We had never travelled together before and Nicaragua was a first for both of us. My Spanish had been honed some years earlier from an undergraduate semester abroad in Costa Rica where I stayed with a coffee farming family.

Bogie’s Spanish was non-existent.

We overpaid for umbrellas at the hostel and walked out into the night’s wind and water. Almost immediately we were trailed by a small band of Nicaraguan children, fascinated by the Americans and unconcerned by the tropical storm.

“Me gusta gringos,” the biggest one with a hat said, smiling through the water on his lips.

“Mira, mira!” pointing off westward towards the old center of Managua, the Place de la Revolucíon.

We had greasy chicken tacos and ice cream, shadowed by the smiling children, sparse-toothed. Somehow in the night the roles were subtly reversed and we followed as we were beckoned around corners and out into the great square. The ruins of the old cathedral lay where the earthquake had left them, a carcass of concrete and sacred shapes. The silhouettes of the crucifix steeples flashed in the lightning against the black sky. I imagined, in my emotion, that I could see goosebumps rising on Bogie’s head. Something so great, hulking and majestic, laid low, and somehow made better for it. I put my hand on his wet back and we shared a little piece of meaning tossed down from the table of God. We followed the children into the outer halls of the 17

structure. The light from the square and the flashes from the storm disappeared inside the walls, the heaviness of the place, drawing the light out of the air and into itself.

Somehow, as we gaped and awed, the children melted playfully into the walls, or grew into teenagers and young twenty somethings blocking our retreat and our advance.

The brick facades, stuccoed once, were calm, the red shadows holding the cat’s nests and the homeless piles.

There were petty weapons and gestures that suggested more significant ones, but all I could think of was the story of it all. The rain had been perfect, the smiles so genuine; our desires so masterfully manipulated, the umbrellas, our protectors, the streetlights so well lit.

For me it meant an hour of a Portuguese nurse picking glass out of my upper arm and stitching me up. For Bogie it meant two months of easing his broken ribs back into the habit of protecting the lungs. It was the beginning of his spiritual calling, the dark shadow of that street-turnedalley, for him, represented a darkness waiting for a light.

After a week in the Managuan hospital, Bogie’s father came and took him back to their home on Long Island.

I decided to spend the last days of my trip at the great Lago. There I devoured the poetry of Nicaraguan Jesus Dario, whose books I’d purchased in the days of Bogie’s hospitalization. Bogie told me about Jesus the night before our flight to Managua, a product of his pre-trip research into Nicaraguan culture. His head slowly flicked from side to side, like a compass needle, as he described the mythic figure to me over drinks at our favorite dive bar in Nyack, “the monastery,” as well called it. By the end of the night we were spitting gin and tonic in each other’s faces as we recited his alliterated lines, careless of any night but that.

There, by the Lago, the carelessness of that night seemed distant and the proximity of the poetry, now, immense.

18

There had been puma sightings in the area around the hostel, so we gringos were advised to stay out of the forests at night. Our whiteness was of particular interest to the beasts. I would hang in my straw knit hammock, suspended in between earth and space. The warm breeze of the tropical nights leant an otherworldliness to it all, the moonlight filtering through the thick air. My hammock was just far enough from the jungle’s edges to feel safe, and yet not so far that I was entirely composed—unconcerned with the cracking of a twig or the ambitious hoot of an owl.

There was an unsettled feeling to it all, as I read quietly, mouthing the words of the poems…just enough to get the taste of them on my labials, dentals, and glottals.

A dark fur that treads the jungle on musical feet, monastic, in the delicate world; a thread of lusts on the margin: turning black, he touches the leaves in the blaze of his hungers, his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol, burn in his head.

III

A

week later, when I saw a Jesus Dario event for the first time, he was shouting his poetry into a sensitive mic, distorting the words purposefully, insisting to the poor administrator in charge of the PA that the volume would remain exactly where it was. The boxy auditorium was the only colorless place in La Virgen, lit like a hospital, with pale walls that used to be white.

“Words should be sharp edged,” he yelled, “crackled and overdriven.”

Jesus’ erratic behavior made his readings more like theatrical performances, and word of the event had spread as far as the hostel where I stayed. It was nothing to travel eight hours to hear him read, the serendipity of the timing 19

not lost on my theological mind. The magic of those nights floating in my hammock while the darkness prowled in the jungle more than balanced the banality of the crowded bus.

During the performance, Jesus kept backing himself and the mic stand further into the folds of the ochre, velvet drapes behind the stage. His mass more than supported his cavernous breath, his neck a conduit of legendary proportion. But his movements were jerky and swift like he could unshackle himself from the earth and disappear, become only voice, scratchy and popping. Many doors were opening in his mind, some perhaps without hinges, not meant to be opened. In his mind there seemed no distance at all between the cupped and shivering pelvis of a woman in labor and the heaving of a galleon on the terrific black waves of a Caribbean storm; or between the child coming into its new existence in the afterbirth fluids and a bee drowned in its own honey. I would have liked to read his poetic treatment of Bogie’s head.

I’d approached him afterwards, crouched and stooped at the signature table. It was an antique walnut piece of tiny proportions, making his already large frame seem outsized and bulking. His head was massive, suited to his stout, legendary neck, but which came first? His hands a tangle of scars and energy, creeping this way and that way across the table as he sat.

“I’m not like you,” he said in Spanish with a smile, but not without direction, or jut, as I reached out to take his hand.

“Nobody is,” I replied with as much confidence as I could muster before his unsettling figure. I held out his new collection of poems for him to sign, like a child trying to be tough around the boy scout fire. I was sure I saw his nostril flare, and that his first movement towards 20

grabbing the pen and the book was jerky, as if it would extend further, like what he really wanted to do was to jump out of his chair and scare the shit out of me. Instead, he signed very slowly, in English: “poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man,” signing only “Shelley.” I grabbed the book and disappeared into the crowds waiting behind me.

It was just a month after the reading that he disappeared.

He never showed up to receive his rarely awarded literary medal. He left the generals, the diplomats, El Presidente, waiting in the hot sun, the sweat creeping down their jowls, past their collars, seeping in where their heavy medals lazed in the heat.

He has since been seen all over Central America: as a cross-dressing prostitute in Managua, as the lover of President Felipe Calderon’s wife in Mexico, as a puppeteer in San Jose. But the truth was that no one knew where he had gone. I thought I might. I had been feeling that darkness again, these five years later, the darkness in his poems, the darkness at the edge of the jungle—perhaps even the smokey darkness that pools in the corners of the Orthodox Churches I’d attended: the shadows underneath the lamps, where the incense hangs heaviest and granite floors are coolest. Lately, it seemed to have settled somewhere above me, the black hanging just beyond my head, waiting to insert itself in any space I left. Gravity was on its side. I would tire before it did. Maybe Jesus got tired.

V

I

n the last year of my doctoral studies, walking became a way of life for me. I walked to think. I walked when I was tired and when I was too awake for the hour. The 21

motion made me feel whole, as if as long as I kept moving some centripetal mystery would hold me from collapsing out of orbit. I no longer believed what I studied and began to hide my shoddy work under layers of abstraction and theory. I’d misplaced my muse along the way, and nature and the celestial movements sang more to me of cool indifference than harmony or solace. I was trying to make a destination out of the journey, and so my walks were never long enough. I could never seem to get far enough from where I started.

On one of these walks, a grey day to match my mood, I saw the familiar bulk of Leonard turning onto a one way street ahead. I’d heard he had moved back home to his parents house outside of Boston, after his divorce. There was a child involved and he wouldn’t be seeing much of her. I shouted out to him. He turned a bit, but not enough to see me, hesitant to commit. I didn’t call out again.

Maybe if I had we could have leaned into each other again, sharing the weight of the sermon the world was preaching at us in its strange language. More likely we would have conjured our best smiles and most cutting sarcasm, over compensating to meet the demands of the humorlessness of our lives.

I’d love to tell of a dramatic conclusion to my life of faith, but there wasn’t one. Maybe the facts just added up.

Or as my physicality became more prevalent with its little aches and pains, I no longer had the will to live a life at odds with my flesh. Or after years of increasing intervals between sex and conversations, she slipped out the back door and walked away, my faith. There was the unsettling robbery in Managua that rainy night five years before, and the excited discomfort of hanging in the jungle hammock and reading the words of Jesus to stay the puma. There were the shaky years of failed relationships, the shedding of my 22

cassock; there were the doctrinally challenging semesters of my Harvard PhD in divinity (the most atheistic place on earth). But there was no great unhinging, no hero’s struggle, no Alyosha or Ivan. The spring turned slowly into fall. The road less travelled petered out into the sunset, so I took the other.

“Why do you believe anything at all?” she’d asked me, my most recent failed relationship.

There was no rain outside, but there should have been, the moisture, dense and palpable as it was. We had our last argument, if you could call it that, and the moment demanded cinematic downpours, but we were like fog, full of moisture, too spread out to rain. The porch was in need of painting, the colonial sculpted posts and rail spindles peelings as they seemed to do every year. I saw her mouthing words I’d never hear and didn’t want to.

I watched her brown curls bouncing like religious tassels from the Church I had just left, or like the graduation cap I had just worn in the Cambridge fields. I stood for hours, well-practiced, listening to the sermon.

VI

T

he sexual liberation of my new found non-belief became old quicker than I would have preferred.

There are only so many possible combinations of flesh on flesh, and my lingering Orthodox conscience disallowed the pervert in me from branching out. I ended up finding more pleasure, anyway, after the shitty or wonderful lay, it didn’t matter which—in the liminal wandering through the dark streets of some new place. I was trying to chase the old out of the new, but maybe I was walking in the wrong direction. I had to keep going to find out. One such night I wandered down the old 23

carpeted stairway, they’re all the same, and out into the Allston streets. I put on my headphones and walked for an hour, or forever, through the streets puddled from that afternoon’s rain. Even if the stairways were all the same, at least they dumped you out onto different streets.

I made a turn and then another. A vague scent triggered a memory and I froze on some invisible threshold. The music hadn’t stopped, but it felt like it had. There were no teen somethings blocking my way or gesturing for my wallet, but it felt like there were. The edges of the concrete jungle loomed around me: no umbrella to shield me from exposure or hammock to lift my body from the ground.

There were no predators in the night, no hidden weapons, and that was the worst of all.

VII

T

here was no Cambridge colonial porch, but it was raining when Bogie and I had our falling out.

Bogie had been in Nicaragua these last five years since we finished at the Orthodox seminary, running a small mission not far from the Lago in Nicaragua. In this version of a breakup it was a letter that I held, not the hand of my wife, and it was the torn seal of the envelop dangling, not her brown curls; and the sermon wasn’t spoken but embodied in the letter from his mission. I’d become accustomed to the sterile, semi-annual mailings, the ones with the stutter-toothed children, with the most symmetrical faces up front, gathered around Todd. But this time, the mailing wasn’t just a reminder of the different paths I could have walked, a nostalgic bump on my road, as before. Todd’s tilted, tiny head looked so fragile, like an offering made for me. And his expression belied some embarrassment at having to make it, at me knowing that 24

he felt embarrassed at having to make it. The children’s faces staring back at me seemed less smiley, more like the missing teeth were their adult teeth and wouldn’t grow back. And it seemed like there must be a relentless schoolmaster standing just outside the frame with a stiff ruler, admonishing them mercilessly to smile, no matter what they saw in the distance, through the wormhole of the lens: me, on a stoop in Cambridge, in the rain.

VII

I

t was a long night: the incense too damp to burn, my entire being limp. The shadows in my room sniffed the soft parts of neck. I didn’t feel like walking. There wasn’t anything left to walk away from.

Coffee was my only reason to live the next morning.

On the ground in the kitchen I saw Todd’s card, face down where I dropped it the night before. There was Todd’s distinct scribbling on the back: “We think Jesus Dario is living in a dump bordering our mission. The children have seen him. I’ve seen him. Unless there’s some other enormous-necked crazy man wandering around yelling poetic slander, its Jesus. He only comes out at night. The machete he carries keeps us from getting close, but he doesn’t seem to want to bother us, so we don’t bother him.”

For me, the idea that this mysterious figure in the dump could be Jesus was a rock in troubled waters. I booked a one way ticket, it seemed the dramatic thing to do. I’d been dropping bread crumbs, but the jungle had swallowed them as quickly as I laid them down, and I had no idea how to make my way back out. Jesus in the dump was the small rise behind the enemy lines upon which I would raise my flag.

25

IX

T

here were nights when Todd and I would stand for hours staring into the stillness that hung above the trash heaps. Some nights we’d see a distant light of flaming garbage in the expanse of the dump, one that Jesus lit when the night became too dark, even for him. There was no doubting the hulking, swift silhouette of Jesus against the piles of trash and the flashing of the fires. Imagined or not, there was a palpable sense that he was looking down on us all the while. He must have accepted our presence, for the fires increased, joining forces with their smoldering ancestors of the previous nocturn. Eventually they linked with each other in a wandering iconostasis of black and orange, a sanctuary of putrid incense. We’d read from my tattered, mis-signed copy of Jesus’ poetry by the light of the burning trash, trading poems til our goosebumps gave way to exhaustion or our eyes gave out from smoke and squinting. From nowhere, Jesus would appear in the center of his fire rings, and there spend the nights.

During these nights, Todd and I would reflect on our years at the seminary. He admitted he’d always felt insecure around Leonard’s brusque confidence. He asked me if I remembered Leonard’s silence on the car ride home from Nyack the night we water wrestled in the Hudson.

“No,” I said.

In the exotic jungle of flaming plastic, catching up seemed petty. We would walk the length of the trail from his mission to the expanse of dump in silence, and stand there in quiet amongst the hissing garbage and the sounds that fill the jungle at dark. On the first night we saw Jesus appear in the ring of fire, Todd reached over and put his hand on my arm, just below the shoulder. The touch was soft, and his fingers damp on my skin. I didn’t shrug him off, but the gesture was never repeated.

26

After a week of our standing homages at the dump, a marked change came over Jesus. He seemed restless in his ring of fire, as if some new phase of the ritual were about to begin. He would stand tall and fierce in his circle, staring out over the flames in our direction, beyond us. He stood with outstretched arms as if facing a bear, looking through us and yelling out his distorted incantations into the smoke-filled jungle. On the third night, as we grew accustomed to the new madness of Jesus, and his yelping had pitched to howls, it ceased, and he slipped out of the ring of fire, as if whatever it was, was finished. He’d cast out his demons and went off into the trash for new ones.

Todd and I maintained our standing vigil of silence until well past the apex of the three-quarters moon, further into the morning than we were accustomed to. The jungle was quieter than usual on our walk back to the mission.

The bright light from the moon dimmed the confidence of the noisemakers. Where the trail wound its way near the Lago, we froze at a loud snapping of branches to our right. I don’t remember if Todd’s scream came first, or the roar of the puma. It was quieter than you’d imagine, their struggle in the sand, where the water met the beach. I ran fast into the jungle, the oversized leaves slapping my skin as I flew into the hot wet dark. A precision of feeling, the moisture and the veins of leaves defined against my arms and the sides of my legs as they whipped my skin. My eyes burned in my head to some new heights of attunement, something insatiable.

I don’t remember turning around. Maybe I ran in a circle. I don’t remember the feeling of the dark fur as I thrashed it with hands. I was far away. I was thinking of how Todd touched me on the scars of my shoulder where the Managuan boy smashed the bottle; of how Jesus had been protecting himself from the puma in his ring of fire, 27

warning us or saving us in his own way with the fierce howls; of Bogie dropping the football and leaving the field; of my last lover in a Russian veil at an Orthodox wedding; of the three swimmers in the Hudson, boys in the suits of men. As the puma and I rolled deeper into the Lago, I felt little drips of my life slipping away, of the inevitability of my losing this battle, the only battle. I couldn’t hold his weight above me. I stopped trying. There was a shift in the light and the water, some new presence, a force gathering.

The weight never dropped. I remember thinking it was amazing that Todd had roused himself from his bloodied heap—that he was strong and courageous, as he grappled with the puma under the waters of the great Lago. Where had he hidden such reserves of strength? And where did he get that machete?

X

I

lay with Bogie where the waters met the sand, enjoying the touch of the small waves against my wounds. I was imagining that each new crest renewed me while the recessions of water dragged away some part of me I didn’t need anymore. The jungle was alive with commotion. I didn’t stir at the cracking of sticks or flinch at the screams of jungle frogs. Bogie hadn’t moved for a long time, nor had I. Maybe if I didn’t move it was ok that he wasn’t moving. The moon and the sun were trading off. There were scattered pages of Jesus’ poetry stuck to the sand or rippling in the crests and troughs of the lake. I watched Jesus and the puma on the beach of the Lago where the waves had left them. He had lifted the darkness, for me, taken the weight from my shoulders. Only the darkness was a puma. And me was someone I didn’t know anymore.

28

And if I stood again the weight of my head would still be there on my shoulders. I let the waves take those thoughts from me, and I pictured us from above: four forms at the edge of the Lago, inanimate and grounded, silhouetted on the sand in the gathering light of day.

29

Prologue to Prometheus or Fragments from a Shorter Work MICHAEL MIROLLA

I

H

e speaks: The trained beast within tires of clubbing the wild one without. And then being clubbed in turn. They pass mute signals while standing guard along my membranous border: an exchange of caked blood, of vital fluids gathered drop by drop in the hope of disease.

Upon final agreement, they shunt me aside and rush to embrace on the line between. There’s no holding them apart and no need to. I’m constantly left in charge of their blunt weapons, knowing they’ll be back once the emotion has worn off.

II

S

ome backstory: After millennia of anguish and bravery, after countless livers have been eaten away and re-structured within him, after he has been rescued and then abandoned to find his way back here, after the chains have rusted to his wrists 30

and both chain and wrist have become an alloy of flesh and iron, Prometheus feels it’s time to divulge his secret.

There’s sufficient proof now that he does it voluntarily and not through torture or flattery. And he begins to shout above the Caucasus, echoing above the mountains: “The secret! Great Zeus, the secret! My freedom for the secret!”

A cow on journeys to escape a gad-fly and her own tail implores him to be silent as earthquakes are being predicted for the area. He continues to shout: “A moment’s freedom!

A chance to blow my nose.” Then, more quietly: “Zeus, listen. I’ll tell you what you’ve always wanted to know. I’ll tell you the date of your passing.” The eagle that looks like a vulture that stands poised on his chest that knows his liver so well tries to explain the circumstances as he pecks away ever so gently. “You must understand ... the secret ... past ... fulfilled ... you’re the only one who doesn’t know it ... victorious ... yes, victorious ... Pan is dead ...” He pecks and tears at the liver at the bursting organ like a bile-grey flower. “Zeus is conquered ... now it’s only you and I ... you and I ... you must understand ... the secret ...” Prometheus continues to shout, unable to let go.

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romethean games: Invite a close friend over for a game of cards. If he’s reluctant due to past experience or brings up other business such as his girl friend, cajole and plead with him.

Mention your long years of friendship and the many times you kept him company when you had more important things to do. As a final measure and one which is sure to lure him over, say that you’ll let him decide on the game to be played. Play several hands while carrying on a trivial, light-as-air discussion. Midway through the third hand, 31

rise up violently, upset your chair, overturn the card table and accuse him of unnecessary cheating if he’s winning or of not having his mind on the game if you’re winning.

Shout at him that it was, after all, only a game between close friends and either attitude is despicable. Let him know in a forceful way that you disapprove of his conduct and allow him little chance to answer. Then, as he rises in indignation to leave (or even if he does it calmly, with a contrite or forgiving air), either stab him through the throat and jugular vein with a carving-knife or let him escape with a severe warning never to return. The latter is in case you can convince him to play the game again; the former, for someone with an abundance of close friends.

Proceed to spend the rest of the evening, and night, if possible, playing solitaire. Practice. Midway through every third hand, rise up violently, upset your chair ...

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romethean duality: The severing of my head from the rest of my body came as a complete surprise to both. For a while their respective tasks were continued as if nothing had happened: my head on the table facing the rest of me and calmly analyzing the situation, figuring out the drainage of blood by a measurement of the pressure, inventing its latest poetic images logically constructed, etc.; my hand recording them on paper without the slightest tremor or slip; then my feet pacing the room, taking the rest of me to the toilet, standing me before the mirror with my head cradled in my left arm, and so on. It was exciting and provided a strange way of looking at my self. But after several weeks of this, my head concluded that it must be stitched back in place for purposes of mobility. The novelty of the situation 32

had worn off. It ordered my body to procure needle and thread. The rest of my body, however, after consulting (by touch) with its various members – especially that radical voice of my penis which had always opposed my head with its outpourings, demanded the right to share equally in all decisions made. This condition was presented in note form and waved before my eyes. My head guffawed, but a menacing hand and a threat to sew it on backwards quickly shut it up. My head then reminded my body that a headless trunk could go nowhere without its expert guidance since it was blind and, aside from running into poles and fences, would be easily picked off by a panicked policeman. Or crazed scientist. As of this moment, negotiations are still being carried on, with both sides grudgingly giving in to minor point after minor point and my penis boycotting the meetings altogether.

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enitent’s Manual According to Prometheus (Revised Ed. 2013.0):

1. Accidentally find yourself on a deserted beach or deep within a virgin forest.

2. Cut a long lean switch from a thorn bush or bring one with you if previous experience has revealed a lack of long lean switches on beach or in forest.

3. Test it by pricking your index finger. Squeeze out the blood. Appreciate the surface-tension drop eager to be licked before plunging earthward.

4. Place cell phone camera eye in nearby branch for capturing of subsequent action. Click video app.

5. Remove your shirt. Stripping completely naked is advisable if guilt has become deeply imbedded through 33

years of neglect (but be cognizant of one-tit-hangingout laws in the United States of America).

6. Think back on all the evil you’ve committed, detail by detail. Think forward as well. The pleasure gained from this is to be added to the penance.

7. Work yourself into a frenzy of hatred against the vile creature that you are as opposed to the beatific one you might be. A good way to do this is to reflect on the number of times you’ve thought of raping your mother and/or killing your father. Or vice versa.

Actual carrying out of these fantasies, of course, puts you on a plane of an entirely different nature. See the Combined and Definitive Rapist and Murderer’s Manual: Washington, DC Edition. There is a specific and very detailed section on mother-violators and patricides. And vice versa.

8. Brandish the switch. Lash out with it fiercely (in particular if a stray fill-in-the-blank happens by).

Prepare your back and other parts of the anatomy for its vicious cuts and scars.

9. The monologue to be used at this point if other spontaneous speech fails: “I deserve it. I deserve every lash and more. I’m a spiritual wart. It amazes me every time a dog doesn’t use me as its fire hydrant.

Whip yourself. Scum! Let the thorns sink in and rend the flesh, the sinew, the muscles, the bones, the very marrow. Let them rip out the deep-rooted canker that’s taken over.”

10. Optional: Repeat. Until cleansed.

11. Upload video images to YouTube.

12. Twitter: “For the vultures out there something I need to get off my chest.”

13. Throw away the switch. Get dressed. Accidentally find yourself in the subway amid a rush-hour crowd.

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14. With one hand on the overhead bar, view video images on YouTube.

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e states his case: There is a dead man lying in a wheat field near Edmonton. Dressed in deerskin pants and a shirt made of beads. Feathers are scattered all around him. He talks to me, of course, as I hurtle by on the train. At first in a whisper; then more and more loudly. So loudly, there is no escaping his voice. He says that the vultures, although circling overhead constantly and even swooping down on occasion for a closer look, are afraid to pluck out his eyes.

Dare not peck at his chest. Why? And the tiny creatures – the ants and the beetles and the flies, the millipedes, the centipedes, the wasps – they all skirt him as if he were still alive, as if he were a magnet repelling iron filings.

What’s wrong? he asks. What have I done to deserve this?

Also, he tells me with obvious embarrassment that he isn’t decaying. Not one bit. His body is still as pink and healthy and glowing as the day he died. Things around him have changed, were changing: the crops, the animals, the fences, the seasons; even the barely visible hills have shrunk and are now only a haze in the distance. But not him. Never him. Several times the wind has buried him, only to have him pop unceremoniously to the surface again; several times, glaciers have scooped him up and dragged him along, with no effect, not even scrape marks; several times, he’s sunk to the bottom of some icy, bottomless lake, only to return to the surface unbloated and fresh as a newborn baby. And he asks himself: But why? What possible reason could there be for keeping me alive now that my time has come and gone? Now that others have overtaken me?

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Now that even my constant Caucasus companion has returned to the earth? As the train passes and speeds on, heading for other destinations, his voice becomes more faint and disturbing. He asks me to do something for him, something to alleviate his condition. Something in return for all he has done for humanity. For the warm hearths and the mushroom images. At last, he becomes nothing but a whisper echoing, a whispering echo (“Do something”) ... something ... something, in keeping with the clicking of the rails. I promise to see what I can do for him, to bring his plight before those with the power to act, the power to change things. But I know even as I pass that there’s nothing to be done. His is a creation that can’t be undone, a creation always on the edge of destruction. And I suspect he knows as much. Has known as much all along. Has known ever since he was spared the fate of his brothers.

Has asked me for help out of nothing but perverse habit.

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e comes to the surface, or Where is Mary Shelley when you need her?: The landlord found it absolutely necessary, in order to maintain his good name, to have a tenant so he came down here and chose me. He warned me right off not to get my hopes high, that there was nothing special or particularly interesting about me. I just happened to be the first. Besides, it was only a temporary job. I might be returned whenever he so desired.

I lived by myself in his cellar and saw him only twice a month: when he slipped the envelope full of rent money under my door and when I slipped it back to him the next day. On growing tired of being alone, I also went down to obtain a companion. I didn’t make the mistake of picking the first. In fact, several were passed over as unsuitable or 36

too old before I found one to my liking: a woman who had died of double pneumonia at the age of twenty. I dug her up and took her home, making sure the landlord didn’t see me. (I contemplated choosing a male companion but finally discarded the idea as too unconventional – though now it seems the in thing to do in some quarters.) Despite the fact she was partially eaten away around the chest and hip area and had a wracking cough which I had to muffle to keep the landlord from suspecting, I truly loved her. She kept me company and went through the motions of cooking my meals. As well, she asked no questions, demanded little of me and had a pleasant conversational style which made it appear as if she were hanging on my every word. She also had a quaint way of sinking her two remaining teeth into my buttocks and drawing blood.

We made love in the earthen cellar or, when emboldened by passion, between the tomato plants in the back yard, plants that produced blazes of flowers but no tomatoes.

It was idyllic, pure bliss, especially when my eyes rolled back and the damp ground penetrated deep into my very soul. And after my need for her passed, after the fear of the landlord’s discovering me overcame my love for her, after her two remaining teeth fell out (stuck to my buttocks), I took her back and re-buried her. What left the strongest impression on me was the way she knelt and looked up at me as I was about to throw the first shovel of dirt over her.

Silly as it may seem, it was as if she were silently pleading to be allowed to remain.

Now, the landlord threatens daily to take me back as well, using the excuse that the neighbourhood is changing, that he wants a younger more upwardly mobile tenant who’ll be able to afford a rent hike. Or even to buy the cellar to convert it into a condo. I suspect that it’s just an excuse, that he knew all along of my companion and is now getting even with me out of jealousy. I guess I should have shared her.

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Whatever happens though, I promise not to beg. Or kneel.

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emoirs of Cronos after his enforced retirement – In a letter to Prometheus:

1. To my dear brother who was lucky enough to escape the wrath of Zeus (for a while) and in the hope he may be able to do something: If not, my apologies to the inhabitants of Earth. It is … er, was … my favourite planet. The only one that realized the importance of clocks. And fire, of course.

2. On discovering that the jewelled time-piece which orders the movements of the universe and keeps the whole shebang on track has been pilfered, I sit down to write these memoirs. They begin with a note to that master usurper: “Dear Zeus, as your respectful and ever submissive father, I must inform you of the fact that great-grandfather Chaos is back in town.

Yesterday, at precisely ... at precisely ... that’s precisely the point! I couldn’t tell the time as he ripped the timepiece right from my vest pocket. I can’t help but wish you’d take better care of those outer regions where he skulks. Perhaps build a cage for him or give him some of those newfangled relativity toys to pass the time.”

3. Several days later, the little fool answers – or rather has his secretary do so as he (unlike you, dear brother) has never taken the time to learn: “My truly respectful and forever submissive father. I am confident that greatgreat-grandfather means no harm and is only playing a joke on you. You know how he is. A gagmeister to the end. In the matter of building a cage for him – you realize (though perhaps have forgotten) it would

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require his permission and his promise to remain within it. P.S.: The senile brat has been hanging around here as well, pushing his black fetid clouds into our faces and farting loudly as the young goddesses walk by. Aphrodite claims he exposed himself to her but one never knows what to believe when she becomes hysterical (besides, what exactly would he be exposing in the midst of all that nebulosity and basic quantumness?). Couldn’t you maybe keep him with you until he grows tired of hanging around a law-and-order area?

After all, you have much more in common, so much more. The good old days and all that wild stuff.”

4. My time-piece! Where is my time-piece? Oh Zeus, you prince of fools! Why did I not swallow you when I had the chance? Now, it is almost too late. I write again: “Dear Zeus, at present ruler of the universe and master of all, it is imperative my time-piece be returned at once. There is no time for politics.”

5. He replies: “Dear Cronos, what is this about politics?

Make yourself clear. Anent your precious little timepiece, it seems Chaos lost it and now can’t remember in which corner of the universe he may have dropped it. He always did have a bad memory and now all he does is dribble and drool over his past adventures.

Anyway, was it very important? I mean, can’t a new one be made? Maybe by that terribly practical and intelligent brother of yours.”

6. Once again, dear brother Prometheus, please submit my deepest apologies to the inhabitants of Earth. If they can’t hear the ticking, then it’s already too late.

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LOVE & THE BODY POLITIC

And what if it isn’t LUCY DURNEEN THE DEATH AND LIFE OF ROMANCE ou fall in love with a voice, with a book, a beard, or lack of. You, who feel nothing, who are a wasteland in a woman’s body. You can’t let any of this show on your face, even when he gets into your dreams and sets them on fire, but yes, one day you make a left turn instead of a right, you buy lunch at one café instead of another and you fall like a cliché, a stone into water. You have so much in common! You are academics.

You teach classes that connect people with their inner poet. You have a mutual affinity for the second person and patisserie. Let’s split the cake, you say, which roughly translates as: you have my heart forever. He won’t, of course – no-one has anyone’s heart that long. But from this point on you move around the city like an echo. It seems bizarre that natural selection has not stopped humanity loving this way, fatally, inconveniently, but this is how it goes.

You are a romantic who has officially renounced romance but keeps looking for it in hopeless places, the way you’d always have half an eye out for a cat that went missing years ago. It has always stood to reason that one day it was going to saunter in, bristle at your leg, lap milk

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like it owned the place. This much is probability. Still, you have a home to go to, and an apartment to clean, papers to grade. That much is fact.

THE THINGS THAT TIGERS WANT n the terrace of a bar near the Zoologischer Garten you discuss literary beards. Right now, he’s on a Chekhov. Hemingway is out of the question because of the way his neck resists all hairgrowth. A pity.

The sounds of the animals in their make-believe worlds of jungles and ice floes, veldt and fynbos float high over the trees. The night moans of the tigers feel centuries old.

He tells you he’s leaving tomorrow. You quote Ondaatje because it’s the only thing you can do.

‘Damn it,’ he says.

‘Damn it,’ you repeat.

You damn whatever you can get your mouths around.

The sour and far-off stench of the wolf enclosure, the fucking cold. Time and the way it moves. Bright pink, rum-soaked cakes with ridiculous names. People who don’t read. That you missed a performance of Offenbach at the Zitadelle Spandau by ten days. You miss him and he is right there in front of you.

You tell him about the thing that made you angrier than anything else in the world, the thing you have never quite told anyone else. In the distance tigers bellow and you realise that even when you feel most crazy there is just no danger in anything you ever do.

‘Let me see those fists,’ he says and you bunch them up. You feel something small and tough, a fierce spirit forming inside you. A fighting spirit. Your breath freezes and flies hard into the night like blue fire djinn.

Somewhere in the dark you sense the tiger turning and

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pacing, prowling the length of its enclosure. More terrible than the growl is its sudden absence. The tiger’s muscles, built for maximum efficiency in the thick, wet Sumatran heat, shiver and contract against a Mitteleuropean chill.

You feel her wasted strength, her nostalgia for sharp jungle grass, the myth of home that, born in captivity, she knows only in her bones, the way eels follow currents blind until they emerge in the Sargasso.

The tiger’s roar breaks free like a running man. It is a sound that is looking for something. The demands of the human heart are no different, you think. Even a tiger feels it. Even a tiger wants more than it already has.

ONE OF YOU IS MARRIED he winter city at dusk, the hour of sinning lovers.

But you are not lovers. You are nounless. Your togetherness indulges no dangerous, expletive verbs, although you use them casually in conversation, sometimes, if not in reference to yourselves. You walk through evening shadows to the U-Bahn, moving from pool of light to lavender pool of light, and there is always a perfect four-inch gap between your hands, your shoulders; your heavy coats do not brush together and so the powder-snow remains untouched on woollen fibres, trembling with your footsteps like jasmine over water.

On one street, synthpop. Bach along another. You pass peeled-paint doors and posters for old operas. Your mind snapshots the shadows of dogs, a diamond necklace behind glass, the warm, grassy scent of horseshit on cobblestone. You catalogue it all with caution; you know what these kind of symbols can do. Yours is a profession that examines the fictional lives of fictional people; their hearts might not actually bleed or melt or commit any of

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the other atrocities that real ones claim to, but you know the odds aren’t good. You’ve written essays on the subject of manifest yearning. When you teach A Farewell to Arms you have a kind of wild look about you, choreographing all that unquantifiable tragedy into a dance performed with your hands.

When he talks about Maupassant you note, appreciatively, that he too is fluent in the language of wild gesture, his crazy-dramatic movements rivalling your own.

If the universe is providing signs, here is a sign. His hands move the air around like he is operating an engine. It is imperative that an ocean of space rises and falls between you, always, but something in these wild-gestures -.

You should have a contest of wild-gestures! A GestureOff. It would be more erotic than it sounds. Something faintly threatening, like the Godfather Waltz, would play as you circled each other, faster, faster, hands raised, eyes flashing. He has that whole Byronic thing going on. It’s hotter than Mercury.

When he asks, ‘What is this?’ what you don’t say is propinquity. You wave your hands in the dangerous way that means neither yes nor no, knowledge nor ignorance.

He is only in the city for two weeks.

Your Jewish friend would tell you, sometimes the harsh fact of life is that it is what it is. Urban Dictionary has another way to define this.

The train stops and you both reach for the door at the same time.

IF YOU HAD READ LESS HEMINGWAY THIS PROBABLY WOULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED ou’re a Modernist,’ he says, which explains everything. Only excessive consumption of Hemingway can be behind this violent hunger,

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the way it’s not enough just to love - you have to also be broken into little pieces and reassembled with your ears attached to your cheeks or a rose where your mouth used to be. He teases you with fake French. You don’t know how to tell him there are days when all you want is for a person to come along with a daiquiri, some passiveaggressive minimalist prose and a huge fish they just trapped with a net of their own design. This is hard to admit because women burned their bras to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Maybe that makes you a terrible feminist, maybe it doesn’t.

In your defence, at no point in this fantasy do you actually cook that fish. You don’t arrange it on a plate, spoon feed anyone, kiss their feet or suck their cock while they slump in a chair and you slow-dance for their unilateral pleasure. You just want someone to desire you in sentences of terse, heartbreaking simplicity. You suspect this need to tell and untell at the same time is, in fact, more than a little Postmodern, but man, he would kick your ass if you opened that can of worms. Instead: you go with him to the airport. The howl of ascending Boeings reminds you how much you love to fly, that visceral keening of the plane as it prepares to take off translating inside you as both don’t-leave-the-ground and make-mesoar. Manifest yearning, you think. Who of us can live with it? Something large and expanding pushed deep into a small space like a heart.

By way of goodbye he says, ‘When I need a Modernist, I’ll call you. In fake French.’

By way of goodbye you say, ‘Ne me quitte pas.’ Your fake French is so good he doesn’t comprehend. He heads for the departure gates, for his real life. At security he gives you the internationally recognised gesture indicating love, unrequited - which is to say, he doesn’t turn around and fix 47

you with a stare that pierces your heart but walks straight on, stopping only for the little see-through cosmetic bag the airlines make you use because if the twenty first century has shown us anything, it’s that it’s possible, always possible, the whole world could at any moment come crashing down because of the simple things we hide in plain sight.

THE ESSENCE OF LONELINESS, OF IN-DERWELT-SEIN our apartment in Rosenthaler Straße breathes the dark, competing smells of people who don’t belong together. Across the street is a café fronted with bright red geraniums and metal tables. At night the tables disappear and people come to dance milonga where just ten years ago Soviet military patrols enforced curfews and teenagers kissed in ugly, bullet-pocked stairwells.

He calls to tell you about a book he just read. In English. What this means is: he doesn’t need you yet.

You curl the telephone wire around your body. You swap anecdotes about work. You talk about seed cake like you are licking at each other’s bodies, then you say goodbye with the awkwardness of strangers who have been forced to share an elevator for a floor too long.

What is this?

You head for the bathroom, turn on the faucet, find your expensive shampoo. Through orange-scented steam you trace the routes his fingers have never taken along your skin and your body becomes an aria, rising.

When your husband comes home, late, you pretend to be asleep. He smells of yeast and rain - not verdant valley rain but the kind that hits concrete and absorbs all the unwanted smells of the city. You lie very still. The cure for everything – vertigo, a fox outside your burrow - is to lie still, that much our instinct knows. The stillness is a way

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of repelling all the movement of the world, the moving dust, the moving curtains, even the moving fibres of the rug that bend like grass under his feet. Your husband shoulder-barges the bookshelves and curses, like he does most nights, but still: you do not move until he makes you.

THE LETTER YOU WILL NEVER SEND ou think about how wild you could be if you chose and realise instead that what you have become is completely motionless. Even the silver-winter sky is moving faster than you. You are outside your body, appraising it, giving it directions like an untrained animal.

Like a playwright, heartbroken by the actors’ interpretation of his words, you want to cry for the distance between the thing you intended to be and the thing it turns out that you are.

You want to say to your husband, don’t do it like that.

You’re not unblocking a drain. You move your hand in the direction of where he is frantically looking for change, playing a bit of Spanish guitar? You move your legs differently, up a bit, back a bit. You imagine gestures of extraordinary wildness that bring another mouth to yours, summon them deep in your prefrontal cortex. Cortex isn’t erotic. You lose it. Your husband sighs, a slow sigh of desire exhausted, so one of you is satisfied. One of you is as good as it gets.

You get up from the bed, sit at your desk and write.

You fuck the hell out of your fake-French speaking friend with words you will never send. You try soft words, love-words, sharp syllables that hurt like pebbles under feet, the broken, meandering mountain-path of the first person present continuous. You pour out these feelings like thick cream, filling a jug that flows over and over the tulipwood desk. You take the sheets of paper, fold the

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words away like gristle into a napkin. Then you stand at the window, open it, cup the folded paper into your palm and set it free. It falls straight to the November slush on the sidewalk. Figures.

The shadows inside the milonga cafe turn fast. Soon the city will be full of the light it celebrates by leading goldenhaired girls down streets paved with gingerbread. Just a little bit Wicker Man. You imagine catching snowflakes on your tongue, or burning inside a giant effigy, and you wonder how it is possible that human existence can be so weird, so beautiful, arbitrary, animal, perfect and terrible, so pointless and yet something you would hang on to at all costs, through all suffering, for as long as it takes.

THE THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE IN SILICO, FULL OF SENTIENT BEINGS THAT DO NOT KNOW THEY ARE IN A SIMULATION ven a tiger’s heart, you feel, rebels against this.

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WAS THERE EVER A TIME WHEN A HUMAN BEING DIDN’T WANT SOMETHING MORE THAN IT ALREADY HAD? t’s rushing down fast from the Baltic – winter. You hear its feet. You remember when, years ago, you caught the morning train to Stralsund, from there the ferry to Rügen Island; you stood on deck watching the hull spray diamonds through a drumtight sea. For non-specific reasons, that was a day when you thought anything might be possible. It’s not even nostalgia, what you’re feeling.

It’s a suspicion that the spotty kid simulating your life in his futuristic garage has got bored, downed a cup of some kind of life-enhancing energy serum and left you on auto

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while he masturbates to the latest thing in space porn.

The night sky above your apartment prickles with light. You make a wish on the brightest star you can find.

Only as you’re closing the windows to shut out the damn milonga do you see the star is in fact a landing aircraft.

You don’t retract the wish because - who knows.

The next time he calls, he asks about the tigers in the Zoologischer Garten. You tell him how the tiger enclosure is currently closed because a keeper was mauled to death.

At first, you are both silent, imagining, maybe, the tiger’s desire. The wreckage of desire. The light of the tiger’s green eyes.

‘Damn it,’ he says.

‘Damn it,’ you say back.

What is this?

It is what it is.

And what if it isn’t?

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Political Ad BENJAMIN SCHMITT I love to squeeze your body. Surrounded by chaotic air I feel the peace of a mountainside making its granite recovery from the earth.

Sitting in our apartment this morning I could pass for a good citizen one of those people in a political ad talking about mutant senatorial elk my face not handsome, but reliable.

The camera could zoom in on us, a white man and a black woman, they could perfectly dehumanize us to convey a message of hope and racial unity.

We could read slogans about our uniqueness written by a college intern on her summer break.

After living here two weeks I still feel lost in our apartment, shelves filled with your books, walls covered with your favorite paintings. People do stupid things on the internet at two a.m. but last night I ate healthy food and read about your favorite charity.

I squeeze your body lasciviously if only because your breaths are familiar, 52

if this was our political ad I would be talking about the sales tax on a nuclear warhead but everyone would be watching my hand around your waistline.

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Blues KEVIN HART

So Sorrow bums his way right into town, So Sorrow comes our way with rusty crown; It’s down oh down, my dear, it’s always down.

He’s got our faces fixed in his blank look, He’s got our names clean written in his book, He’s got our Queen, our Knight, he’s got our Rook.

You said you loved me, and you told a lie, But, girlfriend, on each wall there hangs a fly: It made me hurt, dear heart, it made me cry.

But tears won’t warm my bed at night, old love, I’ve had it plenty, girl, I’ve had enough, What’s past is dead and won’t bear thinking of.

And I don’t care if we must call it quits, At least I’ll nail some sense into my wits, But how you lied, sweet girl, shook me to bits.

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Lovers at the Museum ENAIĂŠ AZAMBUJA Nude woman with necklace An antique china set They pass by.

Exposed engine of a clock lions outside guarding time.

A mummy peers from its glass tomb.

Buddha’s bare chest clinging

a silk

(carelessly) between two fingers.

They go through.

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Prayer BENJAMIN SCHMITT A prayer for carpet to swallow the PCP of your gifts and blessings.

A prayer for wads of darkness to get stuck in our hair connecting us.

A prayer for neighbors to lash out midnight ravings of friendship in the hall.

A prayer for cigarette smoke to make whiskey bleed from my skull.

A prayer for your sweet green lips to survive the tears of lumbering beasts.

A prayer for Ronald Reagan returning to talk you out of conservatism.

A prayer for peace and patience and the forbidden crevices of my fortitude.

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A prayer for these loyal men to find work in the squalor of a sunrise.

A prayer for dreams and confusion the silence and mystery behind the breaking.

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Return from Salt Pond CATHERINE MCNAMAR A

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ll the way home she talked. When they were nearly at his mother’s house at the edge of Accra, he took a short cut behind the new formal streets of the estate, driving through a cuff of dark under an old railway bridge. At the opening there was a crump or blow and the windscreen was in tatters over them. Gunning the car as flickers become ragged youths, he glanced at her face in the dark, saw the rock sitting in her lap like a grinning child.

He’d lived years abroad, but he still came back often enough to know the unsealed roads out of here. He accelerated, charging in the dust, cackles surrounding them as the night air entered the puncture, sailing over the silver splatter in their clothes. Not even an Are you okay? could come from him now. And he knew she was just as misshapen, tossed in the same gulf.

He reached the estate with its clean kerbs and glassedtopped walls. Street lamps. He could talk to her now.

Decide where to go next. To the dodgy hospital on the far side of town? Better a clinic nearby. But still Erica’s mouth stayed closed. He heard a gust of her prattle from five minutes before, the reprimands as small echoes. He stopped the car at a junction, reaching for the moist map of her face and he pressed his lips to hers, feeling 58

a fleck of glass between them. Her tongue was cool and unresponsive.

‘Erica. Tell me you’re okay,’ he said to her.

She nodded.

They both looked at the substantial rock lobbed through the glass, now in a corona of shards on her jeans.

‘Take this off me,’ she said.

He wondered if they should go to the police. But then thought of the hours sitting in the hot oil-painted rooms, the officers like cartoon cops, their adhesion to cardboard colonial praxis. Then the uncoiling hassles afterwards. He and Erica on trial for not being locals. What were they doing under a railway bridge at night? They were surely committing indecent acts? And finally the row of stocky thugs from downtown. Thugs who could find out where he lived. Thugs who could hammer a nail into his dog’s head and rape his old mother. If he were more righteous he could put time into this thing, root them out, spit on their faces. He could spend the next year sitting on a grimy court hall bench waiting his turn amidst the punks and uncles, the battered market girls and baby thefts, the crocodile tears and pragmatic stink of pardon, with a judge in a crisp wig waiting for a fatter hand-out.

He turned to her, lifting the thing from her lap; he opened his door and let it fall to the roadside. ‘We’ll go to Ibrahim’s,’ he said. ‘We’ll clean you up there.’

The rock gone, she now clasped herself. Bits fell from her hair to the masses on the seat.

‘Oh God, Erica. Look at my baby.’

It hadn’t been such a bad day. The Salt Pond property had been what they were looking for. The timber of the main building was sound. The mud huts for guests were in fair shape. The trail to the inlet was magical, and able to 59

be fenced off. If their move to Ghana were ever going to be orchestrated, he felt that these could be its initial chords.

He envisaged the platform construction on the hillock where the jazz bar would be stationed, and she had noted the nearby well-respected clinic and proximity to the busy coastal road. What partitioned their thoughts hadn’t been palpable immediately. She grasped his arm as the agent led them from the main building through the messy grounds sloping down to the sea, around the parched huts with their weary vegetation and lopsided stools. She kept turning back to him, grinning at him, her eyes wide. But then when the agent was gone she said some bullshit about not wanting to shift all her savings for the deposit and expecting him to cough up – at least thirty per cent. She said this carefully as she sipped her second beer. There had been forethought and he felt played. As they were leaving, she said she wanted to see one of the huts again. They walked down the trail to the dusky sea. Inside he pulled down her pants and fucked her softly, the door half-closed and children running past and their two faces pushed into the porous gasping walls.

It was more money than he had earned in the past five years.

He curved into the street of his oldest friend Ibrahim, hoping that his wife Fifi was at home to see to Erica. He wanted to throw off the shock with another man. A part of him even wanted to imagine what the youth had felt – the rock rasping against his shirt as the car entered the short tunnel, lifting its volume into the night air. Then hauling back and volleying with a force. Now he saw their shattered car from the outside, the faceless crash dummies and the chitter of the glass. He wanted to tell Ibrahim how the impulse had run through him, Gun it! Gun it! while Erica was midway through winding him down, undoing 60

him. And how shit-scared he was that there might have been a dozen of them in the night.

He put his hand on her thigh. ‘How are you doing there, baby? We’ll get you through this. Don’t sweat, darling.’ He beeped his horn and Ibrahim’s old watchman slid across a metal peep-hole in the gate, staring at the ruptured vehicle.

He heard Erica’s sobs and reached around her shoulders. *

F

ifi took Erica to the bathroom where she began to tweeze out the glass. He and Ibrahim sat down with two beers on the porch. His shoulders felt torn into and a rogue pain travelled along one side of his neck.

He had a few cuts, but the glass had landed mostly on his jeans. His knuckles were scratched and he had dug a jagged piece out of his forearm. It was now sitting on the coffee table in front of him, blood-free.

‘It’s the fourth or fifth time I’ve heard about it. I’m amazed someone didn’t warn you,’ Ibrahim said lazily.

‘It’s some bunch of kids from Tudu, they come here in the night. Things will move when they knock out some politician’s son in a sweet car, you’ll see. But small fry like you – bet you didn’t have a hundred bucks between the pair of you.’

‘Not exactly. But Erica had some dosh.’

‘Then here’s to you and dosh,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Did you see that place you were talking about? Where was it?

Sekondi?’

Now he wished he had never told Ibrahim about the Salt Pond place and their impossible hopes. The jazz club.

The music school. The cool beach hotel. It seemed as foolish as the crushed glass was tangible.

‘We went there. It may well be a rip-off. Ownership 61

stuff. You can never know who you’re buying from,’ he said.

‘Erica’s interested?’

‘We both are. It needs some thought.’

He knew Ibrahim was biding his time, waiting for the cracks to widen. Erica was older, she wasn’t firstchoice material. Divorced, she’d made a mess of her career, changing in her thirties to become a musician, failing, then returning to teaching. They’d hooked up in Guildford outside a pub between sets, both jaded exiles on a landscape of wet buildings and shrouds of rain. Someone had read her cards that afternoon and said she’d fall in love with a dark-skinned musician. He’d thought she was bonkers, but he let her lead him to her flat. The morning after she was all honey and roses in his heavy rotund arms and he couldn’t let go of her.

‘I had an almighty shag with Adua this afternoon,’ said Ibrahim. ‘And now I’ve got Fifi to look forward to tonight.

Dutiful spouse sex, there is nothing sweeter. Ah, my sweet cock-sucking wife! You ought to tie the knot and start having fun again.’

But he looked out over the neighbourhood with its stands of satellite dishes clutched at the sky. He smacked a mosquito on his neck. ‘Thanks for tonight, you know.’

‘Don’t be foolish, man,’ Ibrahim said.

‘Erica was pretty shaken up. It all happened out of the blue. I’m sure she thinks it was aimed at her.’

‘Don’t be thick. Those cunts couldn’t see a thing in the dark.’

‘The thing is, if they’d gotten inside the car, I don’t know what might have happened. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘No, it doesn’t. Look, you have your woman. You can borrow Fifi’s car. Take her home along the main road.’

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Ibrahim was smiling at him. This was the smile Erica had said she found unsettling. She said she could feel him beneath her skin, his insatiable sexual navigation. Now he tried to hear some sound from inside but heard nothing, the women were tucked deep within Ibrahim’s house of slick tiles and crooked doors. Ibrahim’s fingers were running a riff along the cane armrest.

‘Weren’t you supposed to be playing tonight?’ he said.

‘Yes. I backed out. I asked the guy who helps out at the Golden Tulip.’

‘Adua says you look kinda kinky when you play. Says you get this grungy look that sends a ripple around the room.’

He snorted. ‘So who’s this Adua?’ he asked.

‘She’s just back from the US. She did a journalism course at Columbia, now she wants to shake things up.

Starting with me,’ Ibrahim said.

He shook his head. Winding back, he thought there had been an instant when the windscreen was still intact, when there was a smear or friction on the glass, poised or stilled as they bickered. Had there been time enough for him to whip out his arm to protect her? Hadn’t there?

He felt such sorrow now, such grief. For what he knew – though until this moment he had deflected the thought – was that the rock had finally shut her up. For all she had spoken of the whole way home was his lack of money. How she couldn’t be expected to risk her lifesavings. How what if they split up. How what if the business was a failure. He had stiffened, breathed in and out, at one point wanted to see her crushed. Driving on, he had shamefully overturned these thoughts, but discovered he found her repellent, and even the warm fuck two hours ago seemed grotesque.

‘Shall we go inside?’ he asked Ibrahim.

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‘What’s your hurry, man? I can hear them upstairs.

Fifi’s probably emptying out her whole wardrobe.’

They opened two more beers. A donkey brayed from the scrub surrounding the estate. Then a car horn sounded in the night, headlights slew one way then the other. ‘See? They’re still out there, your stupid thugs. They’re most probably bored as hell and high as rafters.’ *

H

e drove Fifi’s car out onto Ibrahim’s road under the street lamps. It was a compact woman’s vehicle, all wheezy and light, tyres that sang on the bitumen.

‘You look better now,’ he said, touching Erica’s cheek.

She had on a pair of Fifi’s flashy designer jeans, baggy on her thin thighs, and a white T-shirt with a parrot on it.

‘I had a good hot shower. Fifi’s bathroom is like the fifth dimension,’ she told him.

He laughed. Thank God Fifi had opened a bottle of wine. All he wanted was to go home, commune with her.

He saw them slithering on the bare floor.

‘You don’t want to pass by the club?’ she asked.

‘No. Why should we?’ For now that he had spoken to Ibrahim, he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to see how he had been bold and, in his way, successful. He wanted to sluice into her, whisper that Ibrahim would lend him fifteen grand. They could buy the Salt Pond place. Next week even. It was all going to happen.

‘I thought you’d feel like playing. You know, shake it off.’

‘That could be a plan B,’ he said, reaching for her thigh.

‘I don’t want to go to the house.’

‘Why? I thought you’d want to wind down.’

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‘I am wound down,’ she said. ‘We stayed far too long at Ibrahim’s. I don’t think I could go home and stare at the four walls. Not after this.’

He backtracked into third gear by mistake and the car threw them forward. Originally, his compulsion had been to be out there every night, his bass creamed to his hip and whatever happened. There had been women. Foreign, local, curvy, slim. He was big and bulky and wore small glasses and he was very dark. They would say yes to him and he would make love to their bodies. But it was Erica who had locked him into a rearing emotion that was made of devouring. He would raise his face during a jam, look everywhere for her in a panic discharged only by connection with her eyes, and he would crave her open thighs with something that was borderless.

‘You don’t want to talk about the Salt Pond place?’ he asked her.

‘I think we’re done with that,’ Erica replied. ‘In every bloody way imaginable.’

‘I don’t see your point.’

‘Kenneth. Someone throws a rock in your face when you’re talking with the person who’s never going to come to the table for your dream. To me that pretty much means it’s over.’

‘It’s my dream too. And it’s not over.’

‘Can’t you see? A rock in my bloody lap is a sign. We’re never going to have children.’

The twang in his neck returned. He thought of Fifi on her knees, Ibrahim tugging her thick hair and cupping her scalp, rolling her over afterwards as she secretly wiped her mouth. He stared at the creased face next to him.

‘It’s a blockage,’ she said. ‘Someone is telling us to halt.

This is not the way we are meant to be going. Or me at least.’ She turned away from him.

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He dislodged the gears of Fifi’s stupid car, reaching fifth on a short stretch before a bumbling taxi loomed up in front of them. He gassed around this. A vast sensation surged through his tumult. He glanced at her pale folded limbs, everything folded against him. He turned back into Ibrahim’s neighbourhood and then – as she sat up in alarm – took the road they had escaped from into the estate. The lightweight car rocked down the dirt trail and he knew he wanted to hurt her.

‘What the fuck are you doing? Stop the car!’

He skidded on, headlights bouncing as the vehicle jerked their bodies. In an instant they were back. Beneath the railway bridge entering the cuff of dark. A wall of hefty rocks slid down from the disused track and he saw bottles and cans, a grey discarded handbag with its entrails in the dirt and a woman’s shoe. He cut the engine and they were alone. By now her cries had ceased and her hands fell from his heavy arms and she sat there trembling, not looking up, not looking anywhere.

He sat there stricken. All he understood was his desire to disprove her, to upend this woman who believed in cards and signs, to discredit and disown her. He stepped out, slammed the car door and walked away.

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Café Strindberg MARK AXELROD

‘W

hat the fuck would you have me do, you fucking stupid idiotic bitch!’ Those were the last words Strindberg allegedly spoke to his first wife, the Swedish actress Siri von Essen, in answer to her comment about ‘keeping his chin up’ after the panning of his play Creditors in Stockholm, 1891. They divorced in 1891, shortly after the review came out. Always on the cusp of madness, Strindberg abandoned socialism for a kind of radical individualism which begat a religious conversion (1894-96) and his subsequent involvement in the mysticism of Emmanuel Swedenborg, an involvement which spawned a number of plays that met with disastrous results, including Kabbalah Shuffle (1894) and The Fisher King (1895), which was subsequently made into a film.

‘What the fuck would you have me do, you fucking stupid idiotic bitch!’ Those were the last words Strindberg allegedly spoke to his second wife, the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl, in answer to her comment about ‘keeping his chin up’ after the panning of his play Endzones of the Spirit (1896), Bitches (1898), and Cunts (1900), all illustrated by Edvard Munch and all of which met with critical failure.

‘What the fuck would you have me do, you fucking stupid idiotic bitch!’ Those were the last words Strindberg allegedly spoke to his third wife, the Norwegian actress Harriet Basse, 67

in answer to her comment about ‘keeping his chin up’ after the review of his latest novel alluded to it as ‘horribly misogynic.’

They divorced in 1904, shortly after the review came out.

Totally frustrated and fatigued with the Swedish theatergoing public as well as the literati, he decided to take his money and move to Helsinki where he could do what he always wanted to do … open a café far enough away from the Swedish public (and women) that he could not ‘smell them.’

Running Café Strindberg, he entertained poets, novelists, and playwrights alike, allowing them freedom to perform as they desired, without fear of public humiliation and media reprisal. The café became a favorite respite for artists throughout Finland and Scandinavia: Sibelius drank there often and heavily, Dagerman and Søderberg read there, Hamsun sorted through the garbage there, and the café flourished long after Strindberg’s death. But irony would not leave Strindberg alone. When he was on his deathbed, all his ex-wives, Siri, Frida, and Harriet, wrote him a collective letter with the news that he could run from the Swedish theater but he could not hide because the new Svenska Teater was going to be built right across the street from his café. The news caused him such convulsions it resulted in his immediate death. His last words were ‘cappuccino, please … fuck the women’ (Last Words of August Strindberg 88). The café still remains on the Esplandi. Men are welcome, women are not.

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TRANSLATIONS & CROSSINGS

囚徒 朱剑 在我体内 肋骨的栅栏里 这么多年 一直有一个人 紧紧攥住栏杆 身体无限 往前倾 眺望着外面 流水的岁月

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The Prisoner ZHU JIAN Translated from the Chinese by Yi Zhe A man has lived in my rib’s fence for these years, catching the posts tightly, leaning forward constantly, with the eye drawn to the fleeting time outside.

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瓶中信 左右 一个人躲在远方。像漂移的月亮 躲在别家门口的故乡 童时的屋后，遥远的山涧和满坡的紫荆 多像你眨在天上褐色眼睛的星星 异乡的森林，隐隐的冷。我曾经许诺蓝蝶和山泉 要在每年的六月，结下你喜欢的麦子 和狐狸偷吃过的葡萄 去年的天空下着雨。你写给我的信 我的眼泪读了很多遍

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A Letter in the Bottle ZUO YOU Translated from the Chinese by Yi Zhe In the distance hides a man, like a moving moon hiding in the doorway of others’ hometown.

In my childhood, behind the house, the remote mountain streams and the redbud flowers covering the hillside were your star-like brown eyes twinkling in the sky.

Bleakness swept the forest of the foreign land.

I once promised the blue butterflies and the mountain springs, every year in June, to harvest wheat you like and grapes the foxes stole to eat.

It’s rainy last year. My tears read many times the letter you wrote to me.

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A New Alphabet JONATHAN GREENHAUSE Jotting down the symbols of a new language, there’s a thrill of quick strokes incorporating twists of characters & ink’s discovery in an empty space, sounds surging from dark clouds to coat my hands, syllables seeping into sliding skin & shaking diction’s bones echoing in my eardrums. The sharp pagoda of a sonorous roof erupts as lines dexterously detail a water-based trail of linguistic desire, forbidden spaces trampled as my fingers plot the accumulated framework of ink bending in a deciphering of puzzling compilations amidst the wind-stripped vulnerability akin to a rice-paper maze. A single movement starts as innocent pre-cursor to an avalanche of assonance, a structured flow towards an unknown world’s comprehension, a solitary mark like a step & a heart trembling as it approximates another’s, its febrile beats building as it attempts to touch another’s foreign flesh, black scratches becoming a tower of sound; how at the absolute beginning 76

one hopes barriers will be dismantled & a spiraling network of bridges will be erected, an all-inclusive village of our verbal imaginings & a shrine to our disparate array of divinities shuddering upon the wet breath-strokes of a thousand tongues destined to converge in a deafening chorus at this origin of sound.

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The Problem of Evil KEVIN HART

The Problem of Evil’s doing well these days: Five international meetings in one year!

I’ll skip that one in India next Spring, Calcutta’s too depressing: I threw up Last time for two whole weeks, and legless kids Kept hanging right outside our hotel door.

Smart people here in Rome; I loved those grads Who formalized transworld depravity, And that young Finn was maximally cute The way she sat up by the bar, legs crossed, Surrounded by restricted standard guys, One with a knockdown argument, he thought, To get her into bed. Helsinki — yes, I think I’ll stretch to that and stay a while.

Last time they had a blowout banquet there, The Roast Fawn Breast was tops. “It’s just tofu,” Anne reassured us all. “I’m not quite clear What Chinese poets have to do with it,” Quipped George, then smiled around portcullis teeth.

Weird guys, those Brits; and, Lord, their dentistry!

Non-optimal! And that odd smell they have,

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But then I’ve seen an Oxbridge college bath And talk of horrors that you can’t defeat!

Well, here’s my flight at last. Thanks Templeton, And thanks Great Problem that We Cannot Solve!

Just think: Helsinki’s not too long a wait And I’ve a brand new line I want to try.

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Voyage ENAIÊ AZAMBUJA To Marie Miyata My name is Nobody.

Like the floating statue spreading craters on the ground with rounded steps: an elephant of dust trumpets about its inevitable humanity.

The giant’s body is a bridge with which he shapes the coast: feet firmly planted in the rocks, feet as if blades could slit the water’s throat.

Nobody will step in this submerged land.

Hidden verse in the reverse of the river, as if rummaging through Brazil you could find a Japan 80

that can be sipped through a softdrink straw.

Nobody will break the vein which flows from Atlantic to Baltic: a spiral does not break with the force of waves a shell does not open.

Nobody will remain lying down, anxious, counting time zones if rain undefines the day spreads light in the sky, a blur.

But no one will deprive the world of the world.

Chained from hillside to hillside veins enclose veins (the wheat field or the rice crop how to define a hemisphere?) precious mutations in the palm of a hand.

And more: no one will hide the desire which erupts from the Everest to appear in satellite images.

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Atop, the particle of snow and all suspends the cry and collapses on the water channels.

The bird pecks in silence a glass window

that unlocks.

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Journey Breaks Photographs by ANNETTE WILLIS

A --------------- B ISA AC

M

y father is a bohemian. His name is Trinidad or Tríny for short. He doesn’t drink and miss the opportunity to sing, to tell a story, to laugh.

I remember him sitting next to the stereo listening to the lyrics of a song and writing them down on paper. The sound of the pause followed by the rewinding. And then play again. And again. Like he was trying to get somewhere and words were the only medium for the journey.

Whenever he would want me to really listen to what a song was transmitting he would say, Ponle atención chatillo.

Sometimes it was Luis Eduardo Aute, sometimes it was Facundo Cabral, sometimes Silvio Rodríguez. Other times it was Serrat y Sabina whom I 94

ALVIDREZ

had to mentally digest. I got used to listening to the words de la trova. One time Dad was driving my friend Erick and I to my cousin’s house when he asked me to play the Dos pájaros de un tiro CD. As the CD played he said, Busca la canción que se llama adentro, es como la siete, I listened from the passenger seat and noticed Erick in the back was like esa rola que. When we got to my cousin’s house and I kissed my Dad goodbye Erick laughed and said, No aguantaba la risa.

Neta cada vez que le bajaba a la música y te explicaba lo que significaba. Then Erick would mimic my Dad speaking, Adentro se encuentra la carne dormida, y nace un muerto, really emphasizing the hand gestures and facial expressions Tríny has when he is excited about something. I guess I understood Dad but to others it must have looked silly to act out a song.

During one of his explanations about a line in “19 días y 500 noches,” Tríny said something about simplicity.

Look for the song called adentro, I think it’s number seven.

I couldn’t help laughing.

I mean really every time he lowered the music and explained the meaning.

Inside, you find the sleeping piece of meat, and a dead thing is born.

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He said, “La simpleza es la forma más rápida de llegar del punto A al punto B.” I still like that explanation. I didn’t see it then but the simplicity that moves a person from point A to point B really defined my father. The man who wrote lyrics down by pausing and rewinding was trying to define this distance. A distance that exists between the lyrics of his most intimate songs and his life. Pausing and rewinding the stereo connected the point A and the point B just by pressing two buttons.

Whenever I see Dad, which is one or two times every two months, he always smiles when he says chatillo before hugging me.

I

n elementary school my family lived in El Paso’s neighbor city, Ciudad Juárez. Going from Spanish to English in school meant I had to be in two places at once. The three words that my Mother Angélica taught me the week I was enrolled in Sunland 96

Simplicity is the quickest way to get from point A to point B.

Park Elementary were: cookie, milk and spoon. It was really the best English of her too. I memorized each word and the sound of them in association to the image of a glass of milk next to a chocolate chip cookie and a silver spoon. I wasn’t the only kid who spoke Spanish in class but everybody there could sing the “clean up song”.

I just did as everyone else when the time to clean the room came up. In my head I could see Bugs Bunny walking back and forth when the song that goes, “The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah” came up. I didn’t know it was talking about ants until I saw a coloring book with the lyrics.

I continued crossing the border between languages through my early years but the most demanding of all was el puente. As a kid I didn’t cuss but now I can refer to this place as el pinche puente.

The first years of elementary school were relatively simple.

We: Angélica (Mom), Priscilla (oldest sister), Patsy (older sister), Leslie (youngest sister),

Las hormigas marchan de una en una, ¡hurra! ¡hurra!

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and Isaac (me), had to wake up at 5:30 am to get ready for school. Our house was ten minutes away from el puente, so this wasn’t the issue. But our house had only one bathroom.

I can see why Angélica picked my hair to be flat top every year till high-school; this way I needed no mirror to get ready. We had to leave at 6:40 am in order to anticipate la línea del puente and make it to school on time. This was before 9/11. After that day, the alarm clocks had to be re-set to go off at 4:00 am. Monday to Friday. At least two hours en la línea every day.

Waking up was difficult but the breakfast was awesome.

My family was there on the bridge advancing each day very slowly, but every morning we got to eat tamales o barbacoa.

The journey from our house to school had everything; food, fights, music, trying to cut to faster lanes, chit-chat with the US customs who were mexas, rushing through Paisano street trying to beat the school morning bell. I do 98

remember that right at Paisano and Executive there are train tracks that go over the street intersection. Priscilla, or Prísy for short, would say that if you make a wish as the train passed over the car, the wish would come true. The train came from one side of Cristo Rey, which as a kid I thought it was Juárez, and into the side of where once stood Asarco.

It was a transitional image of sound from the train traveling above us granting us wishes.

Sometimes I wished that I would live in El Paso, others I prayed not to be picked to read out loud in class. When I was sad I wished Dad would not fight Mom en la madrugada, whenever he came home drunk and played as loud as possible “Hombre al piano.” At fifteen I learned that “Hombre al piano” is a cover in Spanish for “Piano Man” by Billy Joel. In both languages the harmonica sounded devastatingly beautiful.

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W

hen I was twenty years old, Ciudad Juárez was going through some violent times.

The war on drugs handled in Mexico City was quickly killing Juárez. Exactly 1,120.33 miles between the people making the decisions to fight drug cartels and the city that had to adapt to blood flowing daily.

We made the news as the most dangerous city in the world.

That was not really the reason why Ciudad Juárez slowed down economically and fell in prestige to the world. The news had nothing to do with it, nor the national death toll per day. What really scared the Juarenses was the sound of a machine gun fired ten yards away from you, the car door opening with two guys already in the backseat carrying hand guns, the guy in snake boots letting the owner of “Barbacoa Los Azules” know how much they owe the cartel.

My Dad used to run a restaurant that specialized in making la mejor barbacoa del mundo called “Barbacoa Los 100

The best place for barbacoa in the world.

Azules.” It is really close to Santa Fe International Bridge.

(The place is still there, go and check it out). I always eat here on Sundays with my friends para quitarnos la cruda. This particular Sunday I am eating taquitos with John when I see Tríny and his girlfriend enter the place.

I know her. Her name is Mariana. I remember the time we were coming back from school, all my sisters and I, Angélica driving, when we saw Dad walking next to her.

They were holding hands as they checked out a lavadora.

He saw us, he just lowered his head down. We drove on in silence. I was about to turn twelve when Tríny and Angélica separated. I would see Mariana more and more as I grew older. One summer Leslie and I lived with Dad in his house which was located en el barrio alto, where he’d grown up. It was weird to answer the phone and hear Mariana on the other line. This time I picked up the phone and it was Mariana looking for Dad. 101

The thing is that the summer we stayed with Dad, he was living with Alejandra. All I remember from her is that she was an excellent cook. So when I yelled, Pá, te hablan, and he yelled back, ¿Quién es?, I had no choice but to lie for him cause Ale was right there with him in the kitchen. I said, Es del club, the council that managed the soccer league he plays in every Saturday. I will always remember the look in his eyes when he answered the phone and heard who it really was. It was pure Father to son bonding.

Back in the restaurant, I hugged my dad and kissed his cheek, saying, Daddy!! ¿Cómo has estado? Hace mucho que no te veía. His sporadic beard was long and it felt like my right cheek had caressed sandpaper.

Bien chatillo, ahí más o menos, venimos de levantar unas denuncias.

Hola Mariana, ¿Cómo esta? ¿Y pero por qué? ¿Que paso o qué?

As she was leaning forward 102

How you’ve been? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.

Good chatillo, sort of alright, we are coming from making a police report.

Hello Mariana, how are you? But what’s going on?

What happened or what?

to say hello with a kiss I could see that her face was really worn down. She had ojeras profundas and no makeup on.

Pues bien chatillo, algo triste pero bien.

I was trying to read through them, they were just not themselves that day. It had been like a month since I had seen my Dad or her.

But whenever we met they were usually cheerful. I said to them that I was with my friend John and they said hi to him from a distance. Then my Dad said to me that he needed to tell me what happened but I had to be alone and in private.

I noticed this was his serious self speaking to me, so I just followed him to the office in the back of the restaurant.

I’d seen Dad cry maybe once when I was little, when we still lived together. He closed the door and tried to start talking.

He is the best person I know on how to handle words. He listens closely a la trova, he is a good talker. There he stood, looking at me, and then he began to say, Nos robaron

Good enough chatillo, somewhat sad but fine.

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todo Isaac. His voice cracked.

His words came in high and low tones as he sobbed. Then he stopped talking and hugged me. He smelled of salt, and I could taste the fluids running from his nose and eyes. The room was half lit because no one ever came there. There we stood for five minutes crying.

Even though I knew nothing of the story, I cried as we were entwined there.

Then he asked me if I remembered the house that we were building over by Zaragoza. His pronunciation of Zaragoza immediately strikes the image of a colonia in the outskirts of JuĂĄrez.

It really differs from the Zaragoza which is pronounced in English as Zara-goes-za.

Zara-goes-za is actually a really decent suburban area.

Apparently, Mariana, the kids and he were staying there and he’d already installed the water heater, the floors, and everything else was ready.

Only a few weeks after they moved in, Mariana and he stayed in the house all alone, 104

while Misa and “el Gordo” stayed with their aunt over by la Chaveña. They were asleep when he heard a loud banging.

He said, En la madre alguien se metió.

Tríny was crying as the words came out. I looked at his eyes, but they were lost in the story in his head. He was trying to make sense of what happened.

He continued, I went down fucking fast with a bat and saw five brats who had taken down the door. As soon as they saw me they were scared and as I was about to put one down, I felt a sudden blow to my head. A guy hit me with his shotgun and said, Calm down pendejo. They got me on my knees and I saw that another one was coming from outside.

They were seven in total. I saw a white van outside the house and a truck parked behind it.

The furniture was already on the truck, and then I saw one of them go up the stairs and then I felt like all my blood fell to my feet. I felt a deep coldness. I just had enough time to yell, leave her alone

Estábamos dormidos Isaac y luego escuché un madrazote.

Oh fuck someone got in the house.

Y continuó, baje en chinga con un bat y vi como cinco mocosos habían tirado la puerta. En cuanto me vieron se asustaron y estaba a punto de madrear al primero cuanto sentí un madrazo en la cabeza. Un wey me dio con una escopeta y me dijo, cálmate pendejo. Me pusieron de rodillas y vi que afuera venia otro, eran siente en total. Vi una Ven blanca que estaba afuera y una troca atrás de ella. Ya llevaban los muebles arriba de la troca, en eso vi que sube uno y se me fue la sangre a los pies. Sentí frio Isaac.

Solo alcance a gritar déjala en paz culero. En eso ya traían a Mariana de los cabellos y la pusieron enfrente de mí.

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asshole. But then I saw that they were bringing Mariana from the hair and they threw her in front of me.

I was breaking down. I was not ready for this. He was using his hand gestures. He was using the facial expressions that once instructed me on how to really listen to song lyrics.

Isaac no. Why, why? Why didn’t I sacrifice my life Isaac?

I should’ve died protecting her. No valgo nada. No soy nada.

They made him watch as they raped her. They were laughing at him and telling him that she liked it that way.

He could only feel the pillow on his head and the rifle pointed at him. He said he was a cobarde. She was there on the floor crying and screaming and he did nothing. When the last one finished they all started hitting him, but he felt no pain, only rage, and he could only imagine taking out all these pendejos with a single punch but all of them had guns on them. When they left 106

Cuando termino el último se pusieron a golpearme, pero no sentía el dolor, solo la rabia, y pensaba en matarlos, que ha estos pendejos de un golpe los tumbaba pero todos traían pistola.

they’d taken everything with them, even the clothes.

Time stood still. I’ve seen the news, I’ve heard of it, but nothing really hit me this hard. I listened to Tríny repeat over and over that he should have died protecting her. I saw how this hurt him the most. He who taught me to always defend the weak just like Silvio Rodríguez says in a song, “Aquel que mira la miseria con indiferencia es el más miserable.” Mariana was now part of the statistics of violence. I could only say, Yo te necesito, te necesito vivo. Si hubieras actuado esa noche no te podría abrazar papa, no eres un cobarde, yo te necesito.

We talked for more than an hour. When we were to come out he said, limpia tus lagrimas, que no te vean así. I explained to John that it was better to go now, my Dad and Mariana needed to handle paperwork and stuff. When I went back to John he didn’t ask much about what I did with my dad in the office, but he knew something was wrong. I couldn’t help but cry

“He who sees misery with indifference is the most miserable of all.”

I need you, I need you alive. If you would have done anything that night I could not hug you anymore Dad, you are not a coward, I need you.

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a little when I hugged Mariana and told her how sorry I was.

I held her as she cried, saying Gracias Isaac.

Dad comforted her and they both left the restaurant. John had parked his car on Stanton Street over in El Paso. We were walking from Los Azules to the bridge, both in silence. I paid los tres pesos de la pasada and so did he. We were going up the slope of the bridge, to my house in El Paso, where no one could know this story, or Dad’s ongoing relationship with Mariana. I was walking but I was not sure if time had started running again. I felt distant like there was no bridge to trespass sadness. I saw my Dad. I remembered our salty hug. I pictured Mariana and what she felt. The whole walk over the bridge I wept like I never had as a young adult.

I

am two and a half years older than Leslie. We lived with Mom after we left Dad in JuĂĄrez. We moved from house to house all throughout 108

Mc Nutt Street. We lived from Tobey Street, which used to be the reference place for el correo in Sunland Park, all the way to Comerciantes Blvd. just before McNutt is left unpopulated. The distance is exactly 8.1 miles. My early teenage years exist only in the distance between these two points. We changed apartments six times by the time I was in middle school, when Mom was arrested for illegal migratory status. We lived with PrĂ­sy for almost two years, till Mom was released from jail. It was very brave of Mom to cross through the desert that day in September.

She really wanted us to live here in El Paso and finish school here. She has only explained how she crossed the border a handful of times. Every time she speaks about it she gets nervous, as if she is making two journeys: one where she enters the US illegally and another where she enters insecurity and fear within her head. This is what she said, Don’t think that we were going up on all fours. No, we were really escalating. Halfway there I was about to quit. But there was 109

this young girl with her two kids and pregnant who said to me, Don’t leave me alone. But I was really quitting. It was the guy leading us who said, Nobody is quitting here, and pushed me upwards, from my butt up.

And so we made it up to Cristo Rey. We jumped over the little wooden gate that’s around it when we saw the migras inside their trucks. All my blood went straight to the floor. I immediately took off my jacket and put on a cap I had. But the young girl wouldn’t let go of me, she was so scared, I was walking with a cane I picked up because I was so nervous and she just wouldn’t let go of me. We had to take the small road like a snake going downhill. There we were, pale white, walking right next to them, we wouldn’t even look at them. We were invisible. I could only say to myself, right when we get down they are catching us. But no, we got into a Van and then we took off. I thought that they were following us on the freeway and as soon as we got to the house they were getting us all. But no, if not I wouldn’t be here.

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Yo pensaba que nos iban siguiendo en el freeway y pensaba que en cuanto lleguemos a la casa nos van a agarrar a todos.

The story gives me the chills. The travel time was approximately five hours.

Salimos como a eso de las cinco, ya cuando íbamos para abajo ya estaba el solesote. A distance of five hours. The distance of the border for a Mother. Like the train coming from the side of Cristo Rey. Angélica simply walking down from the same mount. I picture her descending from atop of the mount, her legs and hands full of small cuts, granting me a new wish.

Enserio fue Cristo Rey el que nos dejo pasar entre los migras.

We departed like around five am, when we were going downhill the sun was really burning.

Truly, it was Cristo Rey Himself who let us go through the migras that day.

W

hen I turned 14 Angélica came back to take care of Leslie and me. She decided it was time that we advanced.

She wanted to leave behind what we had been through.

We decided to move to El Paso. The distance between the last places where we lived, which was a housing complex called Villa del Rio, and our first apartment in El Paso, Ochoa Apartments, is 9.5 111

miles. Although it wasn’t much of a change in scenery, our educational level did increase exponentially. Leslie was having a hard time adapting to Wiggs Middle School. But I liked the change of high schools. We lived really close to El Paso High, and I made friends quickly in the soccer team. Angélica could not work anymore by falsifying a social security number. I wasn’t old enough to work. We depended on the small percentage of income Tríny provided us with. One time as I got home from school we had rice and frijoles to eat. As I swallowed the rice I could feel my throat closing.

Angélica was very conscious of her residential status. She was an illegal immigrant. It meant that she was scared of driving. We had to be careful on everything we declared too: food stamps, school, applying for housing again. Now that I think about it, I never missed school because I knew that students were sent to court for that. We kept invisible to the US government.

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O

n Fridays, Leslie and I would go to Ciudad Juárez. Tríny would always make us eat en Los Azules and take care of us for the weekend. He would wait for Leslie and I right at la peseta, the point in Santa Fe International Bridge were you pay 50 cents to cross to Juárez. Right under the bridge runs the street commonly referred to as el bordo. This particular Friday we are late for our international crossing.

We call Dad and tell him that we are on our way. He says, Ya estoy aquí, estoy en la peseta esperándolos. Angélica takes the curve below the bridge so we’ll get off right where we pay la peseta. It’s about seven thirty, it’s dark already. Just as we are turning we see the cop lights. It is one of those random checkpoints with immigration police. As we approach the flashlights and the green trucks my mother’s face turns white. Time is slowing again.

I’m in the passenger seat and I have to lower my window. I see the name on the custom,

I am already here, by la peseta waiting for you guys.

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Miguel. He says, Please park your car in the right lane and we’ll get to you. ¿Que hacemos mamá, que hacemos?

No sé, no sé. ¿Y si te bajas y hago como que yo voy manejando?

No Isaac, espérate, deja pienso.

Leslie does not say a word.

I’m thinking of Prísy and Patsy. Who is going to pick us up when they take Angélica?

Then I see my Mom parks way in front of where we were told.

She turns off the lights but lets the engine running. Le voy a dar, she says. Everything turns to a rush as if time wants to catch up. We go as we know how to go, invisible.

The night, the car with no lights, turning to an alley and parking there. We breathe. I don’t want to leave Mom. She assures us everything will be ok. I am now walking up the slope of the Santa Fe Bridge.

Leslie is next to me and she is quiet, I grab her hand. We see Dad and his look says it all.

He had an aerial view of the 114

What do we do Mom, what do we do?

I don’t know, I don’t know What if you get down and I do as if I was driving?

No Isaac, wait, let me think.

incident. Solo pensaba vete, vete, dale AngĂŠlica. Then we hug Dad and we recover the simplicity of the familiar walk up the bridge.

All I could think was go, go, AngĂŠlica leave.

T

his crossing from A to B seems more normal every time. I am constantly getting somewhere.

There is always a distance. I know that the words I misspell or confuse in both languages my Father will pause, rewind and fix sitting next to the stereo. The distance of simplicity is unclear, invisible.

But like my Mother I have become transparent. I’ve come to understand the distance.

Both worlds can go through me.

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WHY NOT LOOK

The Great Sea of Wieners VINCENT CAVALIERI Priya, Let me answer as you have addressed me: a frank businessman. I will clarify what I sell – three decades in this country have made it clear to me. I sell a green marquise that scrolls from behind subway stairs. I sell black-gummed concrete, soot in sidewalk cracks, flaky paint on girders. I sell ocean and boardwalk planks. I sell a gaggle of spectators, the plucky Japanese on a dais mashing wieners down his maw. I sell “challengers” who are just the arms on his cathedra. I do not sell, as I do not eat, the hotdogs.

This food court, this beehive of my countrymen, exhibits a certain bouquet that you might think of as a sideshow to the sideshow. Pizza, tzatziki, masala/pad thai/sushi, ham croquettes, and dogs. Please note that the bouquet does not include maggoty Sardinian cheese, 50-step-10-hour Bechamel, delicately-spiced Beagle, or grade-A Ambrosia.

This might be an arrangement for another continent, like Queens. You’ve appealed to my exquisite gourmandise and sidestepped my hard-won discernment of compartments.

“Rajit, when will the flour come in?” “Will we have a double show on Labor Day?” “How about 335 for the 118

three-week carrots?” My role in the hive requires a pinch of admiralship. Please consider my “countrymen” and how my introducing a wobble-footed doe to our Kings co-op compromises the spice called admiralship. Their confidence pays the tuition in Queens.

I did ask the wholesaler what a crate of calabash might cost. He cackled and then so did I. Much of my role, I have come to understand, is finding what common flowers are offered in our bouquet. We buy and bill in bulk. “Casu Marzu” or “Dudhi nu Shaak,” may be in Queens but they are not in the Queen’s, ha.

This exhibition wants a sheep sheared of superfluous curlicues. What you indignantly insist a food truck can carry away, cannot be found here. And if it could then where would you take it? Would you peddle shrikhand in a Styrofoam cup? Plop chakris into a hundred plucky maws? There is a spirit in your proposal, but kachoris are no chimmichangas. I regret your sorry error, born surely of liberal serpents at your community college. This city has far thicker walls and ceilings than you’ve been led to believe. On many a street corner, like franks, one can find Patels of varying grades and provenances.

What of brothers and their ideas? What of unfair? A Patel does not leave turf on a rowboat with puri oars, fool girl. Having raised four sons I know that a father mustn’t miss a chance to set a child’s course. When in your boardroom, when you can nod and sprinkle mealtimes onto a thousand turfs, with ten thousand Patels, you may look back and sneer at the great sea of wieners that floated you there, in which my rowboat was once lost.

Rajit Patel

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Psalm of Abraxas JOE NICHOLAS I wonder if the chimps worry about us, watch us with envy – our tools, our towers, our infinite reach.

I wonder if they laugh at us, watch us

tear each other apart

with words and bottled fire.

I wonder if their lips smear in smile or frown?

I wonder if their eyes glimmer

or look away?

I wonder if their palms are open open open to us,

or if their fingers are locked in a fist held close, keeping their tiny slice 120

of it all inside?

I wonder if we should pry them open again, or wait to open ourselves.

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Room with a View at Lake Ohrid BR ADLEY R. STR AHAN After the bath God lifts the curtain from his mist glazed mirror.

Mountains like green-robed monks kneel before this clouded glass.

An arbor, an iron rail, a dove brings down a piece of tattered sky.

Balkan song, a stutter of red-tiled roofs flows down to the edge of water.

And you old buzzard, perched on a green verge what could you want of gods and mirrors.

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On Another Rainy Day CHANGMING YUAN Again, water splashing against walls And windows with each car Passing by, colored umbrellas moving Above unidentifiable human legs Red light blinking towards the storm and White noise, every cherry tree skeleton Trying hard to find a shelter, a long-necked man Hopping around with yesterday’s Vancouver Sun on top off his bald head An oversized truck full of Thick cement pipes making a large turn As a bus is waiting for strangers To get off or on

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Walls (England & Wales) BR ADLEY R. STR AHAN We’ve seen too many castles anyway

the moss grown towers

the crumbling stones

the crooked stairs where sometimes you think you hear the clank of rusted steel.

We’ve crossed the crenellated hills

those Saxon skies

of tumbled walls

and sleeting clouds to see the space-ship spires of yet another church reaching through the rain.

Those solid blocks of gray-green stone weep slowly back to earth.

the postcard towns

with pictured pubs

soon look the same.

So even as the sun peeps through a chink in cloud we gladly wave goodbye.

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Streetlights to Acahualinca TIMOTHY DODD

Unlike the men mostly lost in their moustaches, or the women crammed between crates of mascara, I’m obsessed with Managua after midnight--bus station of walking trinkets, thieves and stranded travelers, dungeons and dancehalls, cemetery veins branching across the Amerrisque, through selva and sierra to pueblos and abuelos forgotten. I sleep on its streets and bury my head in hidden bosoms, watching the ghosts come out from cornhusks covered by cement. I rub the bullion inside its banks and put her unnamed children on my lap, for the fees are frozen in fog. Moustaches and mascara float as ancient footprints on planets afar, seen for the first time.

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The Man Who Grew Wings SUNIL SHARMA

F

ifty years ago, on a summer night when sleep was impossible, and we were lying listening to the roaring of the wind on the roof, my grandmother told me a story that I still remember. The sky was glowing like a luminous sheet, the town sunk into oblivion, and she spoke, Some folks can fly, some cannot. Ratan could.

He was the answer to the fasts, visits to astrologers, and prayers of five eager sisters, a desperate mother and a taciturn father. The boy was the jewel of a family that gloated over his every tiny step and treated him as royalty.

But Ratan desired the impossible. One day I will grow wings and fly out of this house and away from this divided town, he said to Sakshi, the youngest of his sisters.

She said, Did they again call you an owl in school?

Yes. I hate myself. I’m so ugly and small and I have bad eyes, Ratan said and dissolved in tears.

She stroked his cheek and said, Ratan bhai, you are the most handsome person in the world.

When Ratan calmed down, he looked up at her and asked, Are Muslims and lower castes different from us?

Is this what they say at school?

Ratan nodded.

I have a few friends who are Muslims and Dalits.

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They’re all the same to me, Sakshi said.

I don’t understand. My only friend is Muslim and his parents do not like him mixing with the Hindus.

The sister sighed and said, The adults. Who cares what they think. I don’t.

I don’t care either. We’re chums, Ahmad and I. But, Grandmother explained, despite the efforts of the kids, the town remained divided. The Hindus were not united either. There were so many walls around. One day, Ratan said to his mother, Ma, this town has got stale air.

It is killing me slowly.

Ma raised her voice, Never speak of death. It overhears and strikes. Be cautious!

The boy laughed.

You do not understand child. It is our land. This deserttown. The house and the shop, they are ancestral gifts.

Without ancestors, we are dead.

This old town is dead. I want to leave. I need to leave.

Ma started crying, hoping her tears would stop Ratan from even thinking of leaving, but the desire for wings never left him.

One day, an old Arab merchant called. The turbaned traveler was an old friend of Ratan’s father and would pay them a yearly visit. Father was not in so the merchant spent some time speaking to the boy who was drawing pictures of wounded birds and dragons.

You look stricken, the man said, a scar on his right lower cheek twitching.

Ratan sensed a potential ally in that weather-beaten visage and confided in the merchant. He said, This place is killing me, sir.

The merchant smiled and looked around. It was summer afternoon. Attendants dozed in a corner of the 127

grocery shop. The man said, This is a cursed city, son.

Look around. You will see ghosts. Death stalks.

Ratan said, Can you really see that? Are you the Promised One? The man smiled, and said, Travelling makes one wise.

My parents won’t allow me to travel abroad. he said, trailing the outline of yet another broken wing.

Then die here.

I won’t.

Then fly.

I cannot.

The merchant paused, then said, Somewhere, sometime, you will have to set your own terms of living: slow decay and death, or growth through flight. Make a quick decision, boy. Follow the pull of the known or the unknown.

Ratan listened hard. The pen had dropped from his hand.

The man said, I was like you. Felt trapped. Did not want to die in a hellhole. I could not choose due to accident of birth. Then an adventurer told me of the far away city of Equus. The great Equus!

What is that?

A city that respects humanity, where everybody is treated as equals.

Is there such a place on earth?

Yes. In the city of Equus, you are allowed to dream.

My parents said it is fiction. Utopia.

The merchant smiled. Cities do not make us; we make them.

Ratan nodded.

For a flier, no wall is big enough to cross. One should dare to fly high!

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How can I find this city? Ratan asked, his imagination firing up.

The merchant got up and answered, Every destination is revealed at the right moment. No force in the universe can stop a true seeker from the desired quest. At the right moment, my son, a door will open slightly. Enter it, and take your chance.

Then the merchant left. His portly figure disappeared in a gathering sand storm that hit the town with tremendous force. But his words proved prophetic, and some years later, the town failed to stop Ratan from flying off into unchartered territory. It all happened following a banana peel. One bright morning, Ratan’s father summoned him to his shop. He took a detour through twisted lanes hoping to get a glimpse of the one girl he worshipped.

He’d always go on this mini pilgrimage, riding on hope, looking up at the half-open windows of an old stone house, expecting to see the living goddess there. So, he failed to see the banana peel, which now caused the downfall of this silent worshipper at the altar of love. At that moment the resplendent deity appeared in human form and, seeing Ratan completely stretched out before her house, burst into a laughter that resounded like a funereal gong.

Ratan bolted immediately. Instead of going to the shop, he retreated home, and sitting on the iron cot in his dark room, he pondered over the injustices meted out by the unfair gods to mortals like him. But the gods were not done yet. Sakshi entered the room, crying bitterly. Father wants me to stop college studies and stay at home.

The more Ratan comforted her, the more she cried, so he went straight to the shop like a charged-up knight, and said to his father, Why did you ask Sakshi to stop studying?

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Ratan’s aggression startled the father, who was buried in the ledger books. He was scared for a few seconds, but regained his composure and said calmly, None of your business.

No? This is my beloved sister you’re hurting. You asked me to stop my studies after graduation. To stop talking with Ahmad. To stop doing this and that. You have to run the shop. Stop controlling our lives!

Enough, the father cried. She has already failed twice!

Girls in this town do not go beyond high school. She needs to get married and run a household.

She was sick then, but she’s smart. She’ll catch up. She does not want to get married. She’s too young.

In our community, girls marry early. A girl’s place is her marital home. Not an office. Fathers have the last word.

We are beyond law.

Something snapped inside lanky Ratan, and he cried, Things are changing. Fathers are fallible.

The man went white, hands shaking. You are a blot.

I hereby disinherit you. Leave my house immediately. I am dead to you and you are dead to me.

Speechless, Ratan remained rooted to the ground.

LEAVE, the father shouted. You are not the son I wanted. You are a traitor. Never come back.

Ratan left the shop, and, pondering this new tragedy, he recalled the wisdom of the merchant. Now was the right moment to decide. Ratan wandered alone on the dark streets and back alleys listening to the barking of stray dogs. He went outside the town and found sanctuary in the old ruins. Again the voice of the merchant came back, This is a cursed city, son. Look around. You will see ghosts. And the ghosts were real! There were not one or two, but an entire army of ghosts! And some of them were 130

willing to talk to this sad representative from the world of the living.

What are you doing here? asked a voice, half whisper and half screech.

Ratan looked at the trembling white curtain and could not determine if it was a figure or an imagined outline with two empty sockets for eyes.

Leave our domain, commanded the spirit. This is our province till first light of day. You are not welcome.

Ratan said, Why disturb a homeless man? Go back to your realm of the Unseen. Now! The trembling shadow sighed and said, This is odd!

People faint in our presence. Why aren’t you afraid?

Ratan laughed and said, I’ve stopped being afraid!

Do not talk lightly of fear. Sometimes fear can save you. I was murdered for defying the elders and marrying a girl from another religion.

This revelation resonated within the dispossessed Ratan as he stood in a ruined landscape, peopled only with the mass of fleet-footed denizens. He asked what had befallen this otherworldly specter.

They came down one night and shot my woman right in front of me. They beat me badly for eloping with her and dishonoring my family. Then they left me to die on the street.

This town is barbaric! Ratan pronounced.

It is. See that man standing near the broken doors of that haveli there. He was killed for marrying an upper-caste girl. That one, near him, was murdered for challenging the authority of the local landlord.

And the ones swarming near that crumbling haveli there?

The shade paused, then said, They are the persons that 131

were massacred in the Hindu-Muslim riots many years ago.

Innocents butchered by rampaging mobs on the streets of this quiet town. It was madness all around for five days and the town burnt.

Ratan was speechless again. He knew nothing of this bloody past. He asked, But why are you wandering every night?

We will never find redemption. Ever. This town never buries its ghosts. But why are you here?

Oh! I defied my father. He’s banished me. Broke my ties with my mother and my sisters.

The ghost placed an icy hand on the shoulder of the sobbing young man and said, These humans! They will never change! Now, listen, my friend. Do not grieve. Leave this ghetto of narrow minds. I will show you the way to the city of Equus.

Those were his last words.

By the breaking of dawn, when the desert was clad in orange light, Sakshi woke up by the sound of a gentle tap on her window and found Ratan standing on the sill. She let him in.

I am leaving, he said. I came to bid my sweetest sister goodbye.

Both siblings cried silently not to wake the snoring family members. Ratan took her hand and said, Come with me to the roof.

Beyond the city walls, they could see the desert coming alive. The light changed subtly and a heavenly beam left the desert golden-hued. The blue immensity of the sky beckoned. Ratan turned to his sister and said, Please take care of Mother. And never give up.

The sister burst out into tears again.

Where are you going?

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The brother looked into the horizon. Then he jumped to the ledge of the balustrade, balanced his lean body, unafraid of the yawning void beneath his feet. At that moment, just before the leap, a pair of sparkling wings grew out of his back and he took off. In a few seconds, Sakshi’s dear Ratan became but a distant dot in the illuminated space between the heaven and the desert.

Here, my grandmother stopped and sighed.

Did he ever come back? I asked.

No. Did they patch up?

No. The father was adamant. Hatred made him sour from the inside. He could never learn about the virtue of forgiveness. He died a cursed soul.

Like one of the ghosts?

Yes, she said. Like one of the ghosts.

Did Sakshi ever go to school?

No. But she developed a taste for books and found freedom in them.

Can we find freedom in books, grandmother?

She smiled and said, Imagination is a gift. The biggest gift.

Is this story real?

Yes. Can I grow wings?

Of course you can child.

And I did. That night, in my dream, I too flew away.

And it was truly delicious.

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Tomb Sweeping R ACHELLE ESCAMILLA for Uncle Armando I peeled the greasy brown paper off of our bathroom windows in an afternoon filled with filth. The construction at the hotel restaurant never stops even for rain or brakedust gray skies. I can’t stand this clanging the men in hard blue plastic sandals carry thin steel sheets and old men like children crowd the workspace smoking cigarettes drinking tea. With Chris’s used razor blades I found lips where paper lost its hold. The process is slow and satisfying except when the paper

brittle in some areas can’t handle the pull and thus splits.

I’ve dressed like my mother and Tias when they feel the call to clean something they hadn’t noticed needed cleaning before: house dress bare feet bucket full of soap and bleach hot hot water wedding ring removed When the gooey paper is removed I can see a new part of the treetops across the garden the community umbrella is above new wooden western patio furniture where Chris and I pass on another glass full of gin and our british friend tells us stories of the old city: Yemen.

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The kitchen looks huge now that the window paper is gone the bathroom’s exposed from the waist up the windows are sticky with adhesive so I have to plunge hand after hand into the bucket steel wool against glass sponge steel sponge dry dish towel When the windows are clean I feel accomplished as if I discovered a new gurgle of land in the Maldives I lay in my bed astonished that I’ve waited almost two years before noticing the paper blemish.

Now in the mornings the spring-flowering trees are in extreme 3D they scream along with the Bulbuls Chinese exercise music and construction workers. The white pink flowers are too many now too close I don’t remember the flowers being so violent last year a bush outside the window is exploding with thin white petals cartoon-full. We see the red-flowered cotton tree smiling with life as it drops a heavy waxy fist-sized blossom we hear the thud before we see the heart of the bud burst open.

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Itinerary HOOMAN AZIZI It’s night In the beginning the variable and anemic moon is smoking in a hospital bed I’m walking back... we’re walking back me, my son, and his doll who doesn’t get tired or ask questions the city is clean and tight without you the walls are coming together every way I go my son is tired I’m carrying him smelling him his odor is yours I’m writing about you your bitter absence memories laughter and crying Laughter is originality it reveals the skull removes the muscles and the skin just a skull and row of teeth grown from laughter Crying is crumpled like now balled face, wet the effort of a fetus in the moment of birth the effort of a sadness to think human beings are born crying

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And walking is the continuance of a man a man is his own continuance in a walk continuing himself towards himself And life in opposition with death lethargic effort of our organs to breathe, to think which happens in a cry we’re the children of crying alone continuing ourselves towards it somewhere in the ground I’m wearing you I hear your voice in the pulses at my collar and I feel you in my sleeves that mimic your movements in the wind I’m wearing you to touch your pulses and your thoughts I can’t see as far as the hospital or you that’s why I’m writing your eyes which are half anger and half love your mouth, the taste of sunrise your hands, made of snow your tongue, the whole language and the mother of words your body, a vine shoot, thin and giant...

Sky in the hospital bed with a body of night leaden mist of the stars the bases of the bed in a paddy filled with local songs soaking it and splashing water on the stars

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the sky is thinking the defiance of her jaw keeps her mouth closed and stars are circling in her eyes The sea in the hospital bed with a body of fishes, corals and sharks her face is hidden in a wave or maybe in a crying the sun in the hospital bed with a body of light and darkness a battle in a bed Jungle in the hospital bed with the green of the trees two mountaintops and prairie of circles saws and sprouts forest fruits and fragrant butterflies and with her roots in the center of the world The desert is a hospital bed with a body of sandstorms, buried temples, treasure and myths a body of horses, swords fires and the dance of women’s anklets Crossing through you your hurricanes and fires to the depth of the rock of your forehead your waves and mountains that’s why I’m writing my itinerary to show the world another world

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Now, without you old and broken sitting by the table of loneliness and fall with my eyes turned salt from seeing you with rebellious hands, writing an itinerary my son’s doll is my witness Year on the hospital bed with a body of day and night and seasons hands of snow feet of fall body of summer and the face of spring A moon in her face and a sun in her chest God on the hospital bed angels of the favored are sitting on the edge of the bed moving their feet making incense to repel fascism, religion and plague climbing over each other to see her face Who am I? a little clay idol Half human, half turtle? the cart of incidents In steep of life? a moth in the boxing ring awkward and dizzy?

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It’s still night in the end my son’s doll is asleep I have a fire in my skull flames in my eyes a vena or a scorpion holding my heart holding its tail ready for the last moment I have to wash my mind from people ideologies pictures and songs from all my memory I have to throw away my muscles, my organs so I can sleep without fear of decomposition In a coffin floating in soil And this itinerary which is love dissolved in death I have to offer to those who don’t know regret those who know only love And poetry This itinerary a piece of paper in the wind’s hand or a message in a bottle which goes with the waves to the shores of another century

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Welles’ Four Men in a Boat Illustrations by ALLEN FOREST

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In the Same Sorrow JILL JONES 1.

Rustle above breathing.

Old walls un-mended, shafts left open.

Dead money, yellow bricks, grave or a nest, fill of tender, here to be absent.

Curiosity, long sight.

The steadfast, the instinct, and the eagle.

Identification: twin leaves, curly (mallee). unintended double.

Tiredness.

2.

Squawk trill, whatever whistles in air as our twin engines hold flight.

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How to float without silence singing, no water rising in air above great white lake.

Lunettes below, sand islands, salt as satin, old survey tracks, strings to cash geology.

The machine descends through unseen colours made blue or hazy or clean and yellow, sun chemistry.

Folded seas, micas. metamorphs, granite flange.

3.

Afternoon fills, work, rest, horizon’s occasional traffic, ticking galvanised iron, hiccup of sheep step, bird curvature, high to low, trees under cirrus, moving sky.

Produce lies around, ripe, dry, dragged along roads.

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And thought haulage disperses breeze jewel of sugar in late mind, after bread, fibre, grounded in debatable history.

4.

And there, something green, of grass, leaf mass, breath and succour.

Then this utopian day brings its shadows.

Gunshot. Birds fly up in the warning.

No resolution without blue passages, no path apart from the ongoing, which crackles with stubble, and particles, and far-off fire.

5.

Stars hard as diamonds, that is clarity you look for in pools on the way to the coast.

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Land together with water in the multiple but same sorrow, its silt, its shades, ancient and too modern.

What knowledge do you need to traverse the chain of ponds, renaming seasons as they change in reflection?

Flood wash stone, leaf water tannin, what trails.

Tongues of cattle mix with song companies along rivers and billabongs, ethereal creeks, dry beds named like colonies, accounts.

Some things still trace ridges, plateaux, glacier memories.

6.

River lines, trees verticals and levels branch into lakes and into leaves.

In each dry bed cycles and griefs.

Sift, dig, you’ll find.

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Water hides and water rises, in an eddy is the world, of rough currents.

What is spent can revive.

Rivers move land, bearing dust, tribute ever-present.

Tide giving to wind in the dry, wet making earth from stone, remembrance in sediment.

Blood may melt but won’t disappear.

7.

Generation and flood, churning grains to life.

Streams braid desert, rain return.

There will always be winding, air across land.

The diamond stars dissolve each night in the lagoon.

The money dissolves too, another exploit.

Some days you only see rivers.

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Some days all you hear cries through dust.

Shiver of ancient degrees you never see.

Great birds drift to flow’s shaping.

Death moves in circles, drinks at ground.

Making channels and ridges, mud memory.

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REMIND ME

Evidence JILL JONES If there was evidence it’s gone this morning.

Everyone’s hanging on.

You smell something on wet clothes.

It’s not unhappiness you know what that is.

The past is something a prisoner might want to forget, or maybe it uncovers, but what?

You can’t do that, with words, put it right.

That’s the point about lying it’s what humans do.

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Four Frogs: a parallel poem CHANGMING YUAN For the past half century, I have never seen A single frog in this city, not even in the whole country But there are four big-mouthed frogs leaping around Afar in a ricefield of my native village, four frogs Squatting under the rotten bridge on the way leading To an unknown town, four frogs playing on a big Lotus leaf in my heart, four frogs calling constantly From the dark pages of history invisible at midnight Four frogs meditating under a puti tree transplanted In a nature park, four frogs swimming into a fish net Like bloated tadpoles, the same four frogs whose Monotoned songs resonating aloud in different tongues With different pitches, yes, the four frogs still there

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Fillets ROBERT JOE STOUT Snap!

L

ike a popup on an internet page: colors vivid, knives flicking jewels of sunlight as they slash, slabs of fish still twitching, the overpowering smell of recent death. I’m there on the jetty, the acrid tang of the sea in my nostrils, the squawk and swoop of pelicans white against the sky’s arduous blue, raucous laughter of shirtless, sweating locals filleting the morning catch. Transformed against my will, thrust back three years, I lurch towards them, hear the scream—always, always the same.

You’d think it would slide away like other memories, merge into the murky waters of what was, the sting diminished, the details vague. But it doesn’t—and I can’t escape it. As though with that scream my life broke in two and what I’m living now is a severed stub cast aside and the little that’s alive within me wants—needs—to go back, reattach, live from that moment forward, forgetting, discarding, these three years that shouldn’t have occurred.

The scream amputated me, not the boy.

Snap!

L

oreto had changed since I’d last seen it—it was larger, like the rest of Baja. Streets neatly swept, shop signs precisely lettered in English and Spanish, a spread of walled villas and condos flanking the sea. But 158

the attractions they pretended to offer were mere scribbles on the surface; the savor, the duende, of the isolated beach town pinned against desert outcroppings, sand-tinted, swatched with scraggly growth, dominated. It was as though the tourists, the yachts, the air-conditioned beach resorts were mirages, temporary, slides flicked across the eternal, glimpsed then gone.

Like marriage, I thought that morning. Human relationships that vanished as though they’d never existed.

Reality was the staunch gray of crags behind the town, wind-whipped, permanent, enduring the centuries and the miniscule irritations that whisked across their surface— animals, people, hurricanes.

Snap!

“T

his time it’s final.” The blue in her wide-set eyes darkened.

“And the school?”

She smiles. Despite our differences, our arguments, she knows me well—too well. I push aside my emotions, revert to logic as I had to do growing up, a gawky clumsy boy in a body too big for its instincts, unable to run or fight except with words, with watching, understanding, controlling how I dealt with the world around me.

“It’s not about the school. It’s about me” I want to reason but there’s no reasoning in her eyes.

“You’ve thought it through? Decided?”

She nods. For an eternity we stand looking at each other. I reach for my glasses, pull them away from my face, push them back into place. Her schoolteacher voice raspy, didactic, she recites logistics: rent a car, drive to La Paz, from there fly back to San Francisco, stay with her friends Mary and Barbara. I nod. I am logical but my mind is a slow, comprehensive machine separate from my emotions.

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“There will be a lot of details to work out.”

“There always are,” she says.

Snap!

T

he glare makes it hard to see. That and not sleeping well. No segues from one thought to the next, one visual image to another. At a streetside stand I buy coffee, fumbling with paying because the woman’s blurry English escapes my comprehension. The sea air smell draws me towards it, away from the spasmodic traffic, the tourists with their floppy hats and oversized purses.

A few feet onto the jetty I shield my eyes from the glare.

Look north along the beach where fishing pangas have been pulled onto the glittery sand. Barefooted fisherman, pants rolled above their knees, untangle and spread their nets to dry. Behind them, at long cutting tables, a dozen or more filleters slice flesh from bone. Laughter, curses, insults ricochet among them. One of them waves to me.

Sometimes, customers buy directly from the filleters.

I hesitate, then shamble awkwardly off the jetty onto the loose sand, a drop of half a meter, maybe less, but I stumble, almost fall. Those nearest laugh at me.

I recover my balance, shrug.

Snap!

A

t first I wondered if it were real: Candace leaving me, the marriage over. As though I simultaneously stumbled off the jetty and stumbled out of the troublesome togetherness she and I had shared. Two knife blades flashing: one in the hand of the filleter, the other in hers. Candace. She was the one who got the franchise for the school: Montessori, many children of immigrant indocumentados. We both taught. It was us—the school.

Us but it wasn’t us: It was like those movie scenes where 160

transparent forms emerge and slide together while the physical forms stand apart. Transparent happiness.

Transparent sharing.

Snap! remember when I was ten leaving one afternoon through the liquor store doorway into the alley—a deal I have with my stepfather. He doesn’t want me coming in or going out through the front door, not because of the police but because customers might think he was serving minors. It’s dusk, that thick sooty San Francisco twilight that makes one’s eyes feel grainy, forces one to squint. One step past the garbage cans I hear a snarl, high-pitched, electric. A flash of something bright. A figure all in black except for a bright red stocking cap lurches towards another. Again the bright flash and the red stocking cap hits the asphalt, the figure who’d been wearing it tumbling on top of it, writhing, twitching. I want to move but can’t; I see the attacker’s face jerk towards me—his mouth seems huge, his teeth broken. He kicks the twitching form beside him, turns and runs.

I tell my stepfather. I am trembling; he is calm. “Watch the register,” he tells me. He’s gone only a minute or two; when he returns he calls an emergency number, then puts his hand on my shoulder.

“It happens,” he says. “Don’t let it bother you.”

I

Snap!

A

rock. She gives me that impression. Unassailable.

In control. As though the Candace of our marriage spray painted herself solid silver like those performers who pose in Union Square as living statues and the Candace inside, a caring, convivial, argumentative Candace, wouldn’t come out.

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She smiles. I hide my inner congestion with an expression I learned in high school: pushing my lips forward, letting my glasses slide down my nose so I appear to be peering over them. The voice emitting from the living statue is Candace’s, deeper than that of most women, the end syllable of each phrase curiously lilted, almost a question. Though she won’t be teaching she will remain on the governing board of the non-profit, the voice says. “I would ask for a recommendation but really I don’t need it. Montessori is very small world.” Irony. The living statue’s lips pull inward, an amused-at-herself smile.

I push my lips further forward. I want to break through the statue’s patina but instead of her I hear the squawk of pelicans, shouts, the gush and splatter of blood. My fists close—not to do harm but to thrust myself past the scream, the face ripped apart with shock.

“Delmon? Is something wrong?”

“No.” Fist still closed I push my glasses back against the bridge of my nose. “The arrangements, the arrangements are fine.”

Snap!

H

e’s thin as though from an under-nourished childhood. But dexterous. The flaying knife jerks his hand and arm along with its movements like a baton responding to music. Again someone laughs. I fist my glasses hard against the bridge of my nose. The dorado fillet as the teenager slaps it alongside others is white, pristine. Two gulls dart past. One wheels, snaps at a bit of fish that someone throws. Half of it falls from its beak. I duck as it swoops to grab it and my foot sponges into soft sand. The knife blade whips past my eyes as I thrust my hands forward to catch myself, elbow hitting the flaying 162

table, shoulder colliding with the boy. He screams as my head bangs against the table’s cement edge, my glasses fly off, a tumult of shouting, again the boy screams. There’s blood everywhere—my hands, my face. Slumped against the edge of the table, half-blind, I see only a dangling arm, white bone. I try to cry but others are screaming. The boy sags down beside me. The knife glistens on the sand.

Snap! t. I can’t get rid of it. So clear, so vivid—always the same. Then like a movie that suddenly stops. Darkness.

I try to paw through the residue. Remember curses.

Threats. Fishermen intervening. Police. A translator.

The hospital. Women praying. Scrubbing blood off my arms and face in a bathroom cubbyhole. Wanting to tell Candace, needing Candace to talk to, but Candace is gone.

I try to mosaic the events into intelligible form but missing shards leave jagged edges. The boy’s mother—or was it his aunt? I’m not certain, my Spanish is too poor to accommodate details, but she’s consoling both the teenager and me. At the hospital I ask her for help to explain that I will pay for whatever the treatments cost.

Though medicated I wake up in the middle of the night startled, gasping, as the knife flashes past my face. The next day and afterwards, in San Francisco, refusing to tell Candace. Why? Because It comes back and with It an image of her standing in front of me responding, “Details to work out? There always are.”

I

Snap!

L

oreto. Screeching pelicans diving across the jetty. A Canadian flag twitching above a mansion shrouded by bougainvillea. Taxis gliding to a stop: Want 163

feeshing sir? Good place to eat? Three years have passed but it seems like nothing’s changed. The same pizza place. The same Todo que necesitas para pescar sign dangling at an angle over the bait and lures shop. I start to comment, aware of someone beside me. Candace with that quirky little smile twinkling across her lips when we started to make love.

Only for a moment, then she’s gone. But the impression so vivid my brogans scuff the curb and I almost fall. I grope towards her even though she’s no longer there. But she seems to be there, the three years since “This time it’s final” insubstantial, a wisp of time, the spray-painted statue an illusion.

Snap! locate the teenager through the aunt to whom I sent money for his medical bills. Older now, the adolescent puffiness gone from his cheeks. I stiffen against the sight of his arm that ends in a rounded stub. The aunt told me, He didn’t take care, infection, gangrene, it had to be amputated halfway between the elbow and the wrist. No te preocupes, he tells me, don’t worry about it. Now he’s a fishing guide, not a filleter, he says. He thanks me for the money I’ve sent. Then shrugs.

“It’s funny,” he says. “If I don’t look at it I feel like it’s still there.”

“I know,” I say as I grope for Candace’s hand.

I

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Lilla Mamma PERNILLA JANSSON I used to keep her close in the room where I grew up.

Lilla mamma, skin stretched like butterfly wings in a photograph on my nightstand, sometimes smiling sometimes facing the cold wood. We used to visit her in the suburbs around the 292. Time has blurred the edges and the woman in the center. Lilla mamma, pushing an empty stroller through unfamiliar streets, or standing in a garden she doesn’t know how to keep – moving to a home for people on the periphery, alone in a hospital asking to see me. They used to say I was just like her. Impulsive, sensitive, “you’re turning into her now”, reckless, pathetic, an-o-rex-ic.

Each syllable a gunshot at the woman drowning in starched sheets. My mom, beat down and childlike in an oversized gown. I’ll carry her close, my arms like tendrils around her waist and when their words fall like acid rain I’ll peel back our skin, expose the muscle and bone and they’ll know we are the same, she and I.

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The Sorrowing Genealogist as Method Actor IAN C. SMITH We haunt the Record Offices of England chasing shadows of biographies to burials.

Now we board a train in the stony north packed with teachers returning to London.

Post-conference, they exude high spirits, are on for a chat, clickety-clack.

Fragrant battlefields charge past.

Surprising myself, an actor usurping a role, I speak in a borrowed cockney accent, introduce my discomfited wife correctly as Australian, her skin now pale.

I witter on, attuned to idiom, inauthentic.

Small talk is never enough. Clickety-click.

No sharp teacher questions my bogus I.D. My reflection superimposed on hissing greenery, I can’t stop now, reason linguistic lapses could be attributed to antipodean marriage.

Antipodean, a word favoured by these English.

My wife’s forebear cast off. Fourteen years.

A world upside down indeed when you are fifteen.

How long their journey before the vanishing-point?

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Eventually cavernous Paddington’s echoing din.

Cheers, Guv’nor. We wave teachers into their city of blue plaques and spoiled dogs in pubs, our senses wreathed in diesel fumes, Australia just a day away below satellites, not the vast of ocean facing emigrants then, tramping, hearts laden, tall masts looming.

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The Shadow Field JEFFREY ALFIER 1959, a vacant ball field at Wiesbaden Air Base.

My brother Charles and I chase balls our father hits into the outfield. Dad speaks the edicts of what makes a good hitter, words memory spells only with images: the new white ball, dad’s obsolete bomber jacket, the gray German sky, an olive-drab duffel bag of spare gloves. The three of us take turns retrieving the ball from the uncut outfield.

Dad suddenly kneels down with his pocketknife.

I watch the blade cut into earth I think the ball must’ve sunk into. But instead, the blade only extracts dark green leaves of dandelions, all talk gone from baseball to the edible wildness of the world at large. Kneeling there, he appears to my child’s mind that huntsman etched in a storybook our parents read us each night— the tale of the wicked queen needing Snow White killed, the huntsman taking pity, walking

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away, leaving her to retreat into dense forest.

We turn back to our apartment, chewing sinuous leaves. My brother and I glance back at field, all the dandelions scattered deep in the rising grass.

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The Other Sister ANGELA SHERLOCK

Y

ou have to sit in the back of the car because Teresa’s got bad legs. Varicose veins, or something. Well, you’ve got arthritis in both knees and maybe you’d like to stretch out in the front seat. But you’re the youngest of the three. The pecking order still holds even though you’re all over sixty.

Actually, you don’t mind. They sit up front talking, and you can tune them out. You look at the wide, flat country. Bungalows here and there sit well back from the road, squatting in squares of grass. There are no flowers.

No window boxes or hanging baskets or flowers in the borders. Boring. The road goes straight ahead to the distant mountains, but this is the dullest and smallest country. You can cross it in three or four hours. Already you are wondering why you have come back.

Up front, they are discussing the route. Your oldest sister, Janette, is driving and the SatNav is playing up.

She is the only one of you who doesn’t dye her hair. The stiff grey curls are cut close and you want to tell her that it doesn’t suit her. Teresa consults the map she bought on the ferry, then asks you for the atlas in the back. But Teresa never asks. She waves her hand to receive the atlas without turning round. You want to say, ‘The road is still going straight ahead.’

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You stretch your legs sideways, trying to drum up some resentment against Teresa. But really, you’ve probably got more leg room than she has. Another bungalow flashes by.

Like some of the others you have seen there is a tumbled down ruin beside the neat building.

‘Why don’t they pull them down?’ you ask and Teresa suggests that maybe it’s so as not to disturb the famine ghosts. You find out later that the real reason is so that they can duck the planning laws. A house once stood on this spot so they can extend, have granny flats, B&Bs, and not have to do the paperwork. Apparently the tourist trade is healthy. Strange to think of yourself as a tourist. When you were young it was considered an insult. In those days you were a traveller, a hitchhiker.

‘D’you remember when none of us had cars?’ you say, which startles the other two. ‘But we still got about. You know, I was once introduced to an old woman in Libya who had never seen a white woman before.’

Teresa laughs. ‘Mother thought you were such a bad influence. All that travelling. And then America.’

Janette joins in cheerfully. ‘Plus the first divorce in the family. And look where Annie ended up. All your fault.’

You picture her in France then, where trees march beside the roads and even the motorways are planted with greenery along the crash barriers. The Italians in Sirte had complained that they couldn’t buy flowers anywhere in the whole of Libya. You are thinking the same of this place but the further west you go the nearer are the mountains, and flowering shrubs begin to appear in some of the gardens.

Bridgeport turns out to be a riot of blossoms - pots and tubs and baskets drip flowers into the streets. That’s just to keep the tourists happy, you decide. They don’t go in for frills in this country. Frills, of course, remind you of 171

Mary. She was invited but, as usual, there was something else she had to do.

T

h e picture rail is adorned with coat hangers from which all the dresses dangle. There are slinky dark ones glittering with sequins. Great puffs of skirts jut into the room, tulle and net, their bodices beaded and satiny. Narrow frocks in luscious reds and yellows explode into flounces at the shoulders and hems. The room is full of their perfumes.

Lined against the skirting board are the shoes. There are rows of them, all the way around the room. Satin pumps; black leather slingbacks with jewelled buckles; gold high heels with diamanté straps. She used to call them heehiles when she was little. Bending, she claims the crimson leather pair.

Arching her bare feet, she slides down into the shoes and buttons the strap across her ankle. She is three inches taller now and must carry herself accordingly. Her shoulders are held wide and proud, her chin tilted up and her eyebrows arched. She smiles at herself in the long mirror, amused by the contrast between the shoes and the pleated skirt that dips below her knees.

She stamps her feet. One, two. The house snaps to attention.

Slowly, she raises her arms, her face a mask of arrogance, even contempt. She spins across the floor and pirouettes to a standstill. Arching her arms overhead, she gazes back over her shoulder.

‘I must depilate my legs next,’ she thinks, ‘and then my armpits.’

T

he B&B is very new, everything fresh and bright, but the ceilings are too high and the whole place seems chilly. You manage to opt out of sharing rooms and the woman doesn’t seem to mind. They are not very busy at this time of the year.

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You wish she’d leave you to unpack but she is full of helpful advice. Which restaurant to try down on the quay.

Which are the best pubs in town. Where you can shop.

She produces leaflets and brochures, and Janette listens to her suggestions on genealogy searches. You have all been up and travelling since six this morning and now all you want to do is kick off your shoes and stretch out. And fart a little. You suppose Teresa and Janette have been sitting on their own suppressed methane rumblings but when you look at these respectable, elderly ladies, it does not seem possible. You have to convert your snort of laughter into something which comes out as a cross between a sneeze and a cough. Janette is concerned that you may have caught a cold. One more thing to be irritated about.

Eventually the landlady goes. You each retire to your rooms. From your bedroom window you can see the mountain. But the shape is wrong. And the direction.

What else is going to be faulty in your memories? You have not been back here for . . . The calculation is difficult.

There is no event on which to pin it. All you know is that you were a child then.

Suddenly the mountain is blotted out. The sky has darkened to grey and you think it is going to rain. But it is hail, the little white balls bouncing on the window sill, flying up and down as a vicious wind whirls the ice around. It makes you shiver and you remember that saying they have here, ‘The only thing Mayo’s got lots of is bad weather.’ You wonder again why you came.

You ease your feet out of your shoes and stretch out on the bed. It’s only when Teresa taps at your door that you realise you must have fallen asleep.

‘Let’s go out and eat,’ she says and you feel a little jealous that she is ahead of you, fresh and changed, and making the decisions. But the walk down to the quay is pleasing, 173

lights strung along the water’s edge and a cosmopolitan air to the place now, though in your memories it was just where the boats came in. Aunt Maura used to bring you down to buy fish. You can see yourself then, small, close to her side, wrinkling your nose against the smell but delighted by the silvery bodies heaped in the boats below you. She used to stand and talk for ages, to people you didn’t know, the conversation drifting over your head. It should have been boring, but you could watch the fishermen gutting their catch and the gulls screaming and swooping down for the entrails.

Now there are antique shops and craft shops and posh restaurants. When you slide into the booth in the fish bistro, it seems you have all drifted back into the same past. Janette starts it.

‘D’you remember when we used to come down here?’ and you are off, all three of you tumbling over stories and words, nodding and laughing and interrupting each other.

Then you say it, not meaning to, and wish you could swallow the words after they are out.

‘I wonder whatever happened to him.’ Nobody speaks.

The waiter delivers the first course into the uncomfortable silence. You each claim your dish, adjust napkins, pick up cutlery. And no one knows what to say. It is your fault so you will have to carry on.

‘I have such clear memories of Vinny. He was there all my childhood, my big brother, part of all the games we played and the stories we used to tell. And everything I remember is so happy. Do you remember m-m-m-mmincey ghost?’ Janette and Teresa are now smiling with you and all the daft games are resurrected.

‘Blackintopper,’ says Janette. ‘Whatever were the rules?

Did we just have to run around shouting? Or was there some point to it?’

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‘And apple turnovers, on the swings,’ gurgles Teresa, ‘and turning upside-down on the rails at the bus stop and showing your knickers.’

‘And when we got caught playing knock-down-ginger and that awful old man came round to complain to Mum.’ She was ‘mum’ only when you were little. You schooled yourself to call her ‘Mother’ as you grew up. It seemed more sophisticated. More English.

‘By the time I got to the sixth form he was gone. He and Dad used to argue so much.’ You stop to think about that.

‘Did they ever actually fight? You know, hit each other?’

Everyone is frowning now, trying to remember.

‘Sometimes,’ says Janette. ‘Yes, I think sometimes.

But never knocking each other down. Just thumping and pushing.’

‘Dad was jealous, of course,’ says Teresa. ‘It was like stags rutting. You know – clashing antlers and threatening and the old one wanting to be the boss.’

‘But why did Vinny go?’ you ask, too young at the time to remember the details of what had happened. ‘And where to?’ Teresa lets out a laugh, hard and high, and you notice someone looking over at you from the next table. A silver haired gent, sleek and moneyed-looking, and you think he disapproves of the noisy tourists.

She leans forward, suddenly conspiratorial.

‘Guess what Mary told me once?’ and it irritates you when people say that, to guess, when it’s not what they mean. It’s really I’ve-got-a-secret-and-you-don’t-know, a way of making you feel excluded. Or is it just Teresa who does that to you? Funny how childish you get when you are back with your sisters. All the old rivalries . . . But you must listen. Janette is looking startled and you have missed the revelation.

When Teresa is sure she has your attention she repeats 175

it. Vinny used to come and visit and Dad would hunt them round the village, though he never did anything.

But one time Mary smuggled Vinny up into her room and Dad never knew, and you are all laughing and triumphant when the waiter comes to take the plates away.

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he is showered now, her skin glowing from the tanning salon and the gold dusting powder she applies. It has taken her a long time to learn how to use make up. It was not a skill Mother could teach so she has gone to classes in the local college, make up and hair dressing and beauty skills. Her brows are finely arched, pencilled and dusted with a glittering powder. She has curled her lashes, which are lustrous and sooty with mascara, and has sketched in cheekbones and a cupid’s bow. Her hair is still in rollers but it will be tumbled into a cascade of delicious curls to caress her shoulders.

She sits still for a moment, contemplating her reflection.

‘Yes,’ she tells herself, ‘I think I will do.’ She hears his car pull into the drive and tuts a little to herself. Why do young men always have to be so eager? He is far too early. But she is in a good mood this evening so she does not make him wait in the car.

‘We are going to win tonight,’ he tells her, and sweeps her in his arms into the room full of dresses. She laughs at his enthusiasm but silently agrees. Yes, I think we will.

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oday is graveyard day. You are the first awake and this makes you feel virtuous. You hurry getting dressed so as to be sure you are seated in the dining room when the others come down.

‘Lizzie,’ says Teresa, surprised, as she bustles in. ‘Been up long?’ The landlady says the forecast is good and behind her back you make a face at the weak coffee she 176

has served. Both of you conspire a little against Janette, who has slept in. Because there are three of you, loyalties keep shifting. For now, you and Teresa are united by your feeling of superiority. Munching your way through a full Irish breakfast - which you would not normally eat but, after all, it has been paid for - the day’s itinerary is planned. Teresa is being abstemious, limiting herself to a boiled egg, so now you side with Janette as the pair of you tuck into bacon and mushrooms and fried bread.

‘We’ll do the grandparents first. There are more family graves at Killmaclosser and we can go to the farmhouse on the way.’

But when you arrive the house is like none you have ever seen before. This is a pleasant country house, shaded by trees, flowers nodding in the borders. Where is the farmyard? Where are the animals? There is no one around to ask, but Janette knows. ‘Of course this is it. I was here with Mother, oh, about ten or twelve years ago.’ An ancient Border Collie comes round the gable of the house and eyes you malevolently. He is followed by a younger version which bounds cheerfully to your feet, depositing a damp yellow tennis ball for you to throw. You peer through windows, noting the leather dining chairs and the swathes of expensive curtaining, but there is no one here.

‘They knew we were coming,’ says Teresa. ‘I left a phone message and I emailed.’

‘But you didn’t speak to anyone?’ says Janette, and this comes out as an accusation.

‘We’ll walk up the boreen to the lake,’ you say, but at the first bend your way is blocked by great fat bales, wrapped in black plastic. You are all beginning to feel bad tempered now, and Teresa says her veins are aching. Janette takes charge.

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‘We’ll drive round by the road,’ she says, ‘We can get to the lake that way. Remember? It follows round the bottom of the mountain.’

The lake is changed, too, of course. It is choked with reeds and there is no sign of the boat in which your cousins used to row you out across the water. Only the middle is clear now, but then the sun drifts out from the clouds and the lake glitters and dances in the light. Your spirits lift and you all go off to Killmaclosser more cheerfully.

It is easy to find the graves you want in the new part of the cemetery. The paths are neat, the plots trim and well kept. But, Lord, how many of you there are here.

Cousins, uncles, aunts, second cousins. You are standing at one grave, reading the headstone, when Teresa comes up behind you.

‘The reprobate cousin,’ she says. ‘D’you remember him? What a Jack-the-Lad. But he never did amount to anything.’ She sighs and moves off. You turn away from Joe-Joe’s grave. You have not had to think about him for years.

You distract yourself with the task of finding more family graves than your sisters. You are quicker than both Janette and Teresa but they have not been keeping score and do not notice. The older part of the cemetery is much more difficult. The plots are irregular and there are no paths, only ankle-turning rocks lurking in the wet grass.

Headstones tilt lopsidedly and the letters are worn so many are illegible.

It is Janette who finds the grandparents. A big slab is half buried, angled against the dry stone wall. She finds Joseph O’Reilly and his wife, Nora. They have been lying here for longer than your life time. The middle of the slab has been repaired.

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‘Of course,’ says Teresa. ‘They had to break it to put in Auntie Eileen’s ashes.’ You all remember her, the crazy aunt. You took your son to see her in the old people’s home. He was so little then, startling the old biddies with his chatter and his laughter. He called her Auntie Lion and the nickname stuck. But she wasn’t quite sure who he was.

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awning, she shakes out the dress and turns it inside out. She examines the seams, sniffs at the armpits, then hangs it up. He calls from the kitchen that she must come for the champagne and she walks barefoot across the cold, tiled floor.

‘Mmm, lovely, when your feet are tired.’ She wriggles her toes, blissful in their freedom, and laughs at him as he wrestles the cork out. They clink their flutes, and sip the cold wine. He is grinning idiotically.

‘I knew we’ d win,’ he says, ‘I knew it would be tonight.’

He is a new partner and winning is still a novelty.

‘And, sure, why wouldn’t we win?’ she says. ‘Aren’t we the best?’ She stops him when he goes to pour himself another glass. ‘You have the drive home before you, and the Essex police are on the lookout, especially at the weekends.’ He is disappointed.

‘I thought . . .’ He looks appealingly at her, and she gives him a cheerful grin.

‘Yes, Damian, I know what you thought. That we might celebrate in bed, eh?’ He tries to interrupt but she goes on. ‘Of course I understand. But I am more than twice your age, and we are dance partners, and that’s all.’ Again he tries to speak, but she is ahead of him. ‘Yes, we are a winning combination.

But that’s on the dance floor only. No bedroom games. O.K?’ His shoulders sag and she wants to laugh, he looks so much like a puppy that has been refused a treat.

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‘I collect dance trophies, Damian. Not young men.’ Gently she leads him down the hall. He is awarded a soft, dry kiss on his lips then eased out the door. She watches as his car lights dwindle into the darkness, then wanders back to the kitchen.

The champagne fizzes as she lifts her glass. Most of it will be wasted now. What was that trick Janette told her once, to keep a sparkling wine over night? You put a teaspoon in the neck of the bottle, something like that. Did it have to be a silver teaspoon?

Pulling the belt of her robe tighter, she unbolts the kitchen door and walks out on to the lawn. The grass is damp and lovely beneath her feet. She walks slowly, shrugging her shoulders, turning her head, easing out the tension. The sky is almost clear, a few white clouds rimmed with moonlight drifting above her. She stands in the middle of the lawn and raises her glass to the moon.

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he famine graveyard lies above a sweep of land and water and you can hear a curlew singing.

‘Does no one look after these places?’ asks Teresa. You all have to hold hands, help each other across the rock-strewn ground. Three old biddies tottering round a graveyard. It is here that the lost cousin is buried, the black sheep. You have crossed three counties to find him.

His is one of the recent graves, stepped neatly up the hillside, smart with glass chippings and plastic flowers.

His lover said this was where he wanted to be buried, among the famine victims. In their side of the graveyard, the lower strip, you see small, rough stones sticking out of the grass. There is no order to these and they are not engraved. There was no time then for proper burials. So many were dying. Scrape some earth away, tip the body in and shovel the soil back over it. A stone to mark the place.

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You are all quiet as you struggle back to the car. Janette drives down the lane slowly but at the bottom she stops.

‘Let’s get some lunch. And I could do with a stiff drink.’ The atlas is consulted and you set off, a little more cheerful. The pub turns out to be wonderful. Hot smoked salmon and tuna, local cheeses, delicious breads.

An enticing range of whiskeys is lined up behind the bar.

Teresa and Janette order Jameson’s, but you choose a Black Bush and feel something of a connoisseur. The mood of melancholy dissipates and you talk and look around and interrupt each other. There is gossip about the cousins who were not at the farmhouse, about the lot you are going to see tomorrow in Leenane. And about your sister, Mary, the third one, who comes between you and Teresa.

‘The spare bedroom is full of her trophies. Must take an age to dust,’ says Janette. ‘And have you seen the frocks?

She’s turned what was Mother’s sitting room into a sort of wardrobe.’

‘And the shoes,’ you say, suppressing the feeling of disloyalty. ‘I couldn’t walk in those heels, let alone dance in them.’ And all the while you are remembering sitting in a Lyons Corner House, watching Mary cross to your table with a tray of tea and toast. And she has never told the others about your “termination.”

Teresa glances round the room.

‘And the partners,’ she says, dropping her voice.

‘They are all half her age. Half our age,’ she adds after a scandalized silence. ‘However did she get to be so good at dancing?’

You sit there, all three of you, thinking of Mary in the arms of one of her young men.

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Harbor Town Monograph JEFFREY ALFIER I. I catch sight of a stray branch of rosebush wilding through our ferns like a hand under a green silk skirt. I ought to pull it back, lattice it to the mother plant, ensure its obedience upward into blossom.

But I can’t help watching it lengthen along its aberrant path. If I sit and wait till the sun breaches maritime fog, a leaf-shadow might skim the backs of my uneasy hands.

II. From my front steps, the day is vapor trails that lose altitude in distending signatures that reflect off ice in my sloe gin glass.

A breeze swells a white curtain in and out of a neighbor’s window, the room unlit behind it. The faint chime of an ice cream truck fallows at the far end of an unseen street, an altar bell in a dream. House sparrows brush past, gray-brown chaff that sieves the corner of vision, trilling all they know in the space between us.

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III. The waterfront sky wanes to an ashen face.

It’s gritty as homebrew dregs that stare back from this chipped wine glass. Dark seabirds spear overhead—tandem thieves sliding east on a breeze of thin resolve.

Under the eaves, a farthing’s worth of unfallen sparrows are nesting in a biblical apparition.

A woman was mine here once, I think…

If so, it could’ve been her that slipped the extra house key under my wiper blade.

Streetlights kindle their sodium vapor, one by one, amber nets hauling darkness ashore.

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Turns JILL JONES Those things that crack or even sing, aren’t semblances.

They’re real appliances pieces of a house, uneasy things clicking together or folding away along moments anyone makes of the discontinuities you may refer to as ‘my life’, as if that was a continuity and what you had to spend, as an idea that had perseverance that might have enlivened whatever torpid degree or need for sleep you summon by closing your eyes so this light did not get through this light which hangs onto ceilings, onto the minutes it took to push back someone to fold them into the way you fold and turn dead things into whatever has passed whether eccentric or plainer than day.

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IN FOCUS CATE KENNEDY

Cold Snap CATE KENNEDY

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hen I go down to check my traps, I see the porch lights at that lady’s place are still on, even though it’s the morning now. That’s an atrocious waste of power, my dad says when I tell him. His breath huffs in the air like he’s smoking a cigar.

The rabbit carcasses steam when we rip the skin off and it comes away like a glove.

Skin the rabbit — that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr Bailey gives me $3 for every rabbit to feed his dogs. I take them down in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. In the butcher’s, rabbits are $2.50 but Mr Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got $58 saved. I want to get a bike.

Dad reckons it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window looking serious, pointing, touching each other on the arm, he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the sold sign got stuck on and everybody had gone, and he took one of the palings off the side of the house and looked under at the stumps, and made a noise like he was holding back a 186

sneeze. That lady’s a bloody wacker, my dad said. Those stumps are bloody atrocious.

He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. Throwing good money after bad, he said, and kicked the paling. I kicked it, too.

After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything different then. Saw the places they sat and rested, the spots they reached up with their soft noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows. You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you have to kill them in the morning when their eyes are looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr Bailey, he tells me he can’t believe I can catch them so near the town. I say you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nods so small you can only just see his chin moving up and down. You’ve got it there, Billy, he says.

After he gives me the money we look at the dogs and have a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come.

Their eyes get different when they see me.

In the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the trees, and every time I look at them I think of the time in school when I was right and Mr Fry was wrong.

He showed us a picture and said trees lose their leaves in autumn and the other kids started writing it down but I felt the words come up, and I said they didn’t, they lost their bark.

Mr Fry said how typical that the one time I’d opened my mouth in class I’d come up with a wrong answer. I 187

looked at the trees standing bare in the mist and thought about how I’d kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and the other kids sitting smiling staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.

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hen you smell the leaves, they’re like cough lollies, and the bark goes all colours when it’s wet. One day I was looking up at them and my eyes went funny and I flew up high and looked down at the tops of the trees all bunched together and they looked like the bumpy green material on the armchairs at my Aunty Lorna’s place. I never told no one about that, not even my dad. The trees talk loud when it’s windy and soft when it’s quiet. I don’t know what they talk about, probably about rain. When they get new gum tips, they’re so full of sap they shiver in the air. Maybe they’re excited.

Or frightened.

But now that it’s winter, the trees just look dark and sunken in, as if they’re just hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said his body was just closing down slowly like something in the winter. And on the track, there’s ice crystals on the clay, and when you look real close you can see the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in the cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks come into it, rushing outwards like tiny creeks.

Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside and when I put them on once I pulled my hot 188

hands out and smelled her smell. What are you bawling for, my dad said. I hid the gloves just under my mattress.

When I touch them they feel like a green leaf, just soft and dry and bendy and not knowing autumn’s coming.

I

looked up at the lady’s porch lights the morning I got my new hat for my chilblains. Dad made it for me with rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his jumper and my mouth ached with holding it shut then he pulled the rabbit fur flaps down and tied them.

See you back here with the bunnies, he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip heater.

One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, It’s like deliverance down there with you-know-who.

I asked Dad what deliverance was and he rolled a cigarette and said why.

The next time he wanted chook pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked up the chip heater so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then said would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen.

The boy went in. I stood looking at the chooks and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running out holding his hands out in front of him. And they were bright pink like plastic.

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As the boy ran past, my dad called, Don’t forget to tell your friends.

I

pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff. I saw the lady who’d bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing King Gees and you could see the new fold marks in them.

She had hair the colour of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me, like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straight away and not giving me any time to think it over.

She said, Well hello there, has the cat got your tongue?

She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.

I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.

You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag? she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?

I said for Mr Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said, Goodness me, looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see better.

She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame the power would cost an arm and a leg to put through, otherwise she would have made an offer, and that this little place she’d picked up was 190

such fun and a goldmine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside their bag, I could smell them.

What’s your name? she asked me finally and I said Billy.

And do you go to school, Billy?

I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.

And is it a special school, just for special children?

I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really then my mouth blurted out: you got hair like a fox.

She laughed like someone in a movie. Good heavens, she said. You are a character, aren’t you?

A man in a red dressing-gown came out onto the verandah and the lady said, Look darling, some local colour.

Love the hat, said the man to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake. Then she said, Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling, and I pulled one out and Roger said, Good God. They both laughed and laughed and Roger said, Well it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home. Which was wrong. They were both there and they’d turned the light off by now.

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W

hen I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting my boots cracked on the black ice. You can easy go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really, but you have to get down real close to see where the water’s froze then melted a bit then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.

Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because more time had passed.

The skins ripped off with the sound of a bandaid like they put on your knees in the school sickroom. Get them off, my dad said when I came home one time with the bandaids on.

He was watching me so I pulled both of them off fast and they bled again. Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious, said my dad. Get some air onto them. I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.

Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the house. You could hear banging and machines and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges and the ducks had frost on their feathers. One day I crept up and saw the lady standing with her arms folded on the new verandah, which was covered in pink paint, just staring out at the trees.

All around her garden were piles of rocks and I saw a duck standing still as anything under the tree. I went closer and she saw me.

Well, Billy! she called, and I went over and saw the duck was a pretend one.

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Look at all these bloody trees, she said, sighing. I’m sick of the sight of them.

She had on the overalls again but they didn’t look so new now. The digger had left big piles of dirt everywhere.

What are those trees anyway, Billy? she said suddenly and I said they were gum trees and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.

I said it was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she said how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening, she was still looking down the gully towards the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.

Three weeks after that time I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched its leaves I knew it was dying, like when I touched my grandpop’s hand.

It was a big old tree and used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk there was a circle somebody had cut and sap dripped out which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. It was a rough chopping job and the person had used a little saw then a hatchet and I could see how they didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me trying its hardest to stay alive.

The week after that one I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening, seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up 193

again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.

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ou’ve done it again, Billy, said Mr Bailey when I came past. I don’t know what I’d do without you, two big fat ones today.

I got my money and walked up the hill towards the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.

Now I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me and she jumped backwards.

Jesus kid, just give it a break will you? she said in an angry voice. I stood there holding the empty box from the rabbits.

Just don’t creep around so much Billy, okay? she said, getting up. I saw she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said something else.

Where did you get that box, Billy?

I said out of the shed. She laughed and looked up at the sky. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.

Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?

Her voice was all excited, like that lady at the school who pretended boring things were interesting on that test.

What about selling it to me, she said.

I said it was my rabbit box and she said did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up old boxes for the chip heater. He kept nails and bolts in them.

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I know where there’ll be a lot, I said. At the Franklin’s garage sale.

Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.

When is it? she asked.

On Sunday. They got lots of stuff.

Like what? she said, and then said a whole list of things like fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards? and I just kept nodding.

Lots of that kind of thing, I said. Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus.

She folded her arms and looked at me harder. Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?

Yep, I said, but you got to get there real early in the morning.

Like 6.30 or something. ’Cos other people come up from the city.

She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.

I can get there earlier than the dealers, she said, looking down the hill at the trees all secretly dying in a row to the lake.

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n Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.

I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware 195

shop and cutting open their skin. In the night, while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over all through the night.

When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars, cold metal that hurts your chest. I felt a still, stiff rabbit in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.

It looked like it was sitting up there by itself on the track, alive. All the crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all round that turn.

I got back into bed when I was finished. I felt my mum’s gloves.

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y dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.

You’d better go out and check your traps, he said as he split the kindling.

Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch. It had crumpled into one of the big gums and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr Farrelly said the ambulance blokes had nearly skidded over themselves on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help.

What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning anyway, Mr Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. Bloody loonies.

Under the front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic.

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That’s what nature’s like, for everything poisonous there’s something nearby to cure it if you just look around.

That’s what my dad says.

I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike.

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Interview with Cate Kennedy PAUL MCVEIGH

Cate Kennedy is an Australian author based in Victoria.

She graduated from University of Canberra and has also taught at several colleges, including The University of Melbourne. She is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. It was also shortlisted for The Age fiction prize 2010 and the ASA Barbara Jefferis Award 2010, among others. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has twice won The Age Short Story Competition and has appeared in a range of publications, including The New Yorker. Her collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Kennedy is also the author of the travel memoir Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight and Signs of Other Fires. Her latest book is The Taste of River Water: New and Selected Poems by Cate Kennedy, which was published in May 2011 and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry.

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MCVEIGH

“Cold Snap,” which we are reprinting here in Two Thirds North 2015, ended up in The New Yorker. It’s an extraordinary story. And you know it right from the beginning. There’s something about unhappiness, the pain of childhood, and the wider context of the gentrification of this small town. Do you know when you’re writing a story like that just how special it is? A feeling that tells you this is it.

KENNEDY I do feel that surge when it’s a special story. I love banal.

I’ve often found in my writing life the more ordinary you can create that depth charge the more universal that story will feel to other people. It’s like Chekhov, when he says something like: “I can’t tell you who my heroes are.

All I can show you is how they live and eat and love and die.” They don’t have any bigger life than that, but very occasionally I have a moment of confidence where I know exactly what has to come next and I can feel that’s about those heavy levels of subtext. In “Cold Snap” it’s when the father does that thing to the kid when he comes to the house. He makes the kid burn his hands and then tells him to go tell his friends. When I wrote that scene I thought, I can just see where this is going. It doesn’t happen very often. I could see the potential for that bizarre ruthlessness. Nature is not relentless or out to hurt us, it’s just itself. And that boy is like a force of nature. He is the antidote for the bad thing. He is like the child operating on behalf of the natural world. So I did feel something else going on that I wasn’t expecting.

I had a look at the comments on The New Yorker when the story appeared. Some people referred to this futuristic, dystopian work and I was like, It’s nothing like that, it’s 200

just that it has that chilly acknowledgement that nature is going to outlast us, nature will trump everything. Just that remorselessness, that’s a better word than relentlessness.

Nature is remorseless and here is this small agent of nature who contains within him that same remorselessness. You are never going to win against that kind of coldness. He doesn’t have that warmth. He’s in a cold town.

One thing I’ve learned about living away from urban settings is — and it’s the Kafka epigram for the collection Like a House on Fire — “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” I feel like I’m saying the same thing all the time, we are tiny limited things and we have no purchase on this great, implacable, natural world. If I was to step back and ask, What are you always writing about? What is your preoccupation (which is a good thing for a writer to ask themselves, I think)? What is the bone I keep circling and burying and digging up and gnawing and burying? It is: sit with your powerlessness in this world. It’s great for making fiction out of because there’s nothing more compelling than someone fighting against their own powerlessness.

You know that great canadian Keith Johnstone, who wrote the book Impro for Storytelling? In it he talks about the great impulse for dramatic energy and says: Well, a character needs resistance and the best resistance is the truth. I think that is exactly what I’m trying to do all the time. It doesn’t have to be a meteor trying to hit the earth or snakes on a plane, just what is the reality in this person’s face.

MCVEIGH

There is often conflicting advice around write what you know. For me, my work isn’t autobiographical, per se, but I write what I know is true. Here is my truth. I can’t write anything unless I’m absolutely sure of its truth.

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KENNEDY I totally agree with you. What’s emotionally true.

Write about what you emotionally know. We’ve all had childhoods. We’ve all felt powerless. We’ve all felt lonely.

We’re all afraid of death. We all don’t want to be alone.

There isn’t any other material we need to cover. You want to make sure you’re honouring all the things you share.

Why would I not write from my own position of my unimpeachable authority? That’s what I want: a sense of authority on the emotional life of these stories. They’re watertight. I think very hard about the way I’m feeling, and this is how writing connects with other art forms.

When you stand and say Bravo to a violin virtuoso who made you cry, you are honouring those hours of invisible work, the loneliness, solitude and desire to connect, which has gone into that small distillation of virtuosity. A story is exactly the same thing.

I’ve got to the point now, if you’re writing the story and you stumble upon the little truth lying there, put that in.

Now your experience is mirroring that which your reader’s experience is going to be. If I can have that experience when writing I can be pretty confident that if I do that well enough, and get out of my own way, then the reader will have the same surprised experience of discovery.

It’s not what you’re expecting, but it feels right. Weirdly inevitable. Otherwise, it’s just not finished.

MCVEIGH

I love your openings. They draw you right in, for example in “The Light of Coincidence”: ‘I am not one of life’s success stories.’ You are right in a character there. For me, what you do in the opening is state clearly what you don’t in the ending. You say, Here’s my territory, here’s my character, hear their yearning. At the end you become more 202

esoteric about that. You start with this clear point, then open out, especially in the later stories.

KENNEDY The only way to make you follow the story into your own life is to be metaphorical. I’m not going to give you the answer. I’m not going to give to you on your terms. I’m going to leave that implicit image like a little plate on the table for you and back away. I don’t want to tell you your emotional response. I don’t want that, myself, as a reader.

That’s the difference with non-fiction, where someone is making a claim. You can’t do that in fiction. In fiction, you aren’t making a claim, you are making an offer.

We are always seeking the correct metaphor. The more nuanced I can make that, the more I rely on you the reader, for me to understand how that turns a key in you.

MCVEIGH

How much does a writer need to know when they set out on a story?

KENNEDY I think when you start out you are very insecure about all that. It’s excruciating for your unconscious even to be heard in that process, because it won’t work to be in this straitjacket of control, and so you’re so far out of your comfort zone, floundering in an area that you’re actually afraid of. On another level you should be writing the stories you are afraid of, you should go there, I think that’s going to be a better story really. Our memories operate in a story-like way, so it encourages you when two things are stuck together in your mind. That calm curiosity is not the same as wanting to pull the engine apart, either.

You just put it down and see where it goes, knowing you 203

can always take it out later. Nothing done in this way is a waste of time. I don’t want to “rewrite” a manuscript, I want to uncover and take out the extraneous stuff and get back to the little glowing beautiful thing, to honour that first thing, that was there implicitly in the first draft.

MCVEIGH

You mentioned that your stories hardly ever have urban settings and there are other arenas that your stories tend to occupy. They are usually domestic stories, but there’s often a wider engagement with the world we live in. You come across as an author who is very socially aware and politically engaged with the way the world works.

KENNEDY Yes, though that’s one way to kill a story – get a couple of sock puppets and get them to have a political argument.

But, yes, I am interested in domesticity. I’m interested too in the pejorative, dismissive attitude to that subject matter by many reviewers and critics who think we should be writing on a grander scale, or that I should be writing on their behalf. They want me to have a different subject matter and they wish I would move on, but in contrast, I feel like I want you to read more carefully instead. I want you to read this as carefully as I’ve written it, really. But I don’t think they’re thinking in those terms.

I think the small ordinary thing that breaks open something extraordinary about our bigger battles with ourselves is really interesting. I’m from a generation of people for whom there’s this overriding idea that I can’t do anything in the world until I sort out my own stuff and I really want to do this work on myself before I engage or commit to anything else. I think that is just crap. I think 204

it’s the operating in the world that’s going to fix up your stuff. So I’m completely at odds with ‘politics’ as a kind of opportunity for self- development.

I love characters who suddenly realise they are powerless, who are working out how to operate in a world where things are out of their control. Again, everything is a story.

I love talking about story but not so much about process – no-one wants to listen to an artist talking about how they stretch canvas, how they mix paint – just get on with it and make the thing. Don’t give us the preamble. Commit. I find that quite a political thing to do. I wish writers would spend more time asking themselves why they are writing, rather than just how. We get so caught up in expertise, that’s all well and good, but why are we doing this? Why writing, instead of digging wells for people with no clean water? Why aren’t we doing something more useful in the world?

MCVEIGH

I guess, that’s what I was trying to get at earlier. Is that one of your motivations. Is that your fight? Is that part of what makes you want to write?

KENNEDY When Dark Roots was published there were no short story collections being published in Australia. There were only competitions. I was working as a librarian, and then working in a second hand bookstore, because I am a reader. That’s what I love to do. I could happily just read for the rest of my life. I began to write stories for competitions because it was like an exercise in a craft, but I didn’t have that ‘burning need’ to write. It was when I went to Mexico – and it’s so ironic isn’t it, you don’t get 205

what you want, you get what you need – I went to work in a micro-credit co-operative with people who had basically nothing. Those people were unable to hoard. One of the things we were trying to encourage them to do was to save, but they lived in a society where, if you saved $100 then you could wake up one morning and that was worth $10 because your president has fled to Ireland with everything the country owned. So if people made any money they wanted to spend it. You didn’t save up and buy a washing machine, you had a party. You spent it as quick as you could. It made me see, when I returned to Australia, that my problem with having any kind of creative life was that I was a hoarder. I was a hoarder with my own assets - a miserly little person who had this wallet of ideas and I would count them every morning and dole out one for this thing or that. I was a miser because I was scared I wouldn’t have enough ideas for another day, and there is nothing but grief down that path. Something amazing happens when you spend it all, when you put everything you’ve got into that next story, everything you’re hanging on to, and make it the best thing you can do, without worrying that you’ve got nothing else to save. You start to trust that tomorrow, when you wake up, rising from beneath like a well are better ideas, better currencies, better things than you’ve been hoarding in that little purse of yours.

So don’t be a miser. Be profligate. Spend it all. That was a gigantic turning point for me. That made me realise I really wanted to do this, and I wanted to do it even if it meant self-publishing and just giving books away.

I was really not hungry for success, but hungry to give it away. I would have done anything to let you see how I feel. If I could have written a song I would have sung it to you. So I wrote poems. I remember feeling this deep self206

censorship, just like we talked about earlier. I felt like an effete, entitled fraud. How could I think writing poems was useful when the world needs clean water? Eventually it occurred to me that maybe I should try to write poems that in their own way are like clean water. That’s why my last collection is called The Taste of River Water, because that’s all I can and want to do with writing, I think. Just give you something really small and quenching that you didn’t know you were thirsty for.

MCVEIGH

I believe, as a writer, your personal philosophy, your truth, is very close to your artistic one, your voice, your work.

Your story “Angel” is written in the voice of a Vietnamese refugee. Did you worry about writing from that point of view? How do you write that with confidence?

KENNEDY Look, I wrote that story years ago and wasn’t at all confident that it wasn’t going to feel like ventriloquism in the worst possible way. I never read that story aloud, actually, because I still can’t feel I own that voice. Everything in that story, except the murder, actually happened in a place I used to work. Ordinary life is so rich and there’s always something story- like in the way our memories order that stuff. You’ve got to trust your storytelling instinct is retaining details and giving you things in a certain order so that later, when you’re looking back over that first or second draft, you’ll see something you’ve accidentally revealed to yourself. You have to trust that process. The metaphor you try to graft on afterwards is never going to feel as organic as the one you tried to boldly launch into without thinking too hard about it.

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MCVEIGH

I found the first person a bit of security blanket when I started off. It meant I didn’t need to have my own author’s voice.

KENNEDY Exactly. And you find your writers voice through the actual writing. It’s not really to do with your expertise, it’s to do with your instinct for language and your intent to honour the voice of the character you’re inhabiting. You don’t want to intrude, you want to be invisible. That’s what I want to do. I want to be transparent. Then I can focus on letting the character direct plot. That was a big breakthrough for me, to stop thinking about plotline and let the character see. Plot is the vehicle in which your character is driving, which in turn is driving your story.

We need to believe in that character and their dilemmas, whatever the stakes are. you’ve got to make them really clear early on, otherwise why would we would we engage with anyone else’s drama? Then you want to see these things addressed - fulfilled in some way.

MCVEIGH

I found that my writers voice came from the characters I chose to write about, the choices they made, the arena I wrote in.

KENNEDY That’s so true. Yes, writers can go mad in those early stages, because everything is fluid. There’s a million strings going off in a million directions. After a couple of drafts you can’t keep making those incredibly fluid audacious changes, and you need to narrow down and commit, and that’s one of the great things about short stories. I’m totally convinced that 208

limitation is one of the form’s most incredible strengths.

Limitation is wonderful. It disciplines you about the materials you’re working with. Other people who make art are restricted by what they’re working with: a potter has only clay, a sculptor knows the limitations of bronze.

When you’re a writer you haven’t got any parameters, you’re just floundering in the massive ocean of language.

It’s really easy to feel overwhelmed because you have no footing or containment. So you have to think: What am I going to use as my containment? Well, I’m going to use a limited point of view or limited time frame. And I’m going to create limitation in my character, which is the cause of their dilemmas right now. The narrower you can be the more precise your desired effect can be. I have an endless, endless fascination with just the capaciousness of the short story form, because anything is possible once its directed and driven by character. Your plot opens itself up in a way you could never have predicted or controlled.

I think you have to write your way through a fair few crappy stories to realise there aren’t any magical top ten tips. There isn’t any plot device or template you can impose which brings your story to life the way your instinctive trust of following character can. Dive in. You want to win someone’s heart in 10 pages – because that is what you want to do isn’t it? So you’d better start your story on the brink of change. Here comes the movement, the impetus, the spur to action for your character. We all understand it when we feel that surge of energy. I find it in poems as well. That surge of understanding that feels like an intake of breath.

MCVEIGH

The rules of theatre work well with the short story. In a script you are usually dealing with what is not said.

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Everyone’s covering up what they really mean and there’s no prose in between explaining thought processes, you have to show everything with the dialogue and action.

When you work with dialogue it becomes clear that people are hiding all the time and there’s a conflict or tension between what is said and what is felt/meant.

KENNEDY What you’re describing there is plot. I once heard plot described in 3 words: Things get worse. Make things worse. There’s the thing you are subconsciously striving for, where you’re not thinking too hard about plot, but thinking about character and the thing in their path.

That obstacle can be as simple as the truth. And that is the true way of working out a resolution. Characters are not going to get what they want, they’re going to get what they need. That’s what’s going to happen to them, because the thing they want most is not what they’re going to reveal voluntarily. Isn’t that true of your life as well as fiction?

We want to know we can trust our author’s authority, and it feels ‘true’ that no one is saying exactly what is going on for them. If they do, or ‘blurt’ the stakes in some revealing way, then the story is finished. That’s actually the climax.

MCVEIGH

It’s interesting too how you can play with that because, for example, if you have a character stating what the story is about, you are fooled by their disclosure, but really the story is about something else the character is yet to know.

To me, it’s like the truth of the story is the body under the frozen lake. As the story goes on the ice is melting and at some point that body is going to come to the surface. It’s all about how fast the ice melts, who’s going to find the body.

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KENNEDY And we want to put character under enormous pressure, apply a blowtorch to that ice, because then we are going to see something come to surface. We’re going to heat the water so it boils what’s under there, until it breaks the surface. The climax is better called something like the ‘tipping point’, probably. It can be incredibly internal, that conflict, but that has to be the end. From that point of no return on, it’s like I’m going to show you how the character is embodies that change. I’ve deliberately made it into a framing device. It’s a fantastic medium, the short story, because that can happen on a small, small scale which can still rivet our attention. We can have this story happen right here, today, in the car, on the way to the furniture store. When I get negative criticism it’s about how banal or prosaic my subject matter is: ‘Why can’t I move out of that banality of everyday life? Why can’t I write something more experimental?’ I don’t know, maybe I will, one day, but right now, I’m on the way to the furniture store.

MCVEIGH

I think you experiment with time and tense. I see an author inhabiting the past, present and future at the same time. I think that’s quite a goal for a writer to somehow show time/reality in that way.

KENNEDY I suppose that’s right. Stylistically it’s all about what’s on the page. There’s the trust relationship between me and my reader which is a nuanced relationship full of shifting dimensions, and what I’m striving to give them is the jolt that someone or something in life has given me.

There’s nowhere to hide in a short story. You have to win 211

someone’s faith and trust and love in just a little doorway of time. I think about the potent ‘depth charge’ power of a word. Sometimes I know a story is finished because I’ve found the right word, so I’m much more interested in resolution. You were saying you think I write great openers, well, I see them as a foreshadowing of my promise, I’m going to take you somewhere good in this story.

You put all the elements into this kind of crucible, and you add the heat knowing they are going to be transformed by each other.

MCVEIGH

Your endings have become less neat. There’s more like a third act now. A different energy at the end. A what was that story about? space. You don’t spell out the end – it’s more like a breath for us.

KENNEDY It is. It’s an exhalation. Then you’ll put the story down and go away and a week later you’ll be driving along and be like Ah! Of course I want that. I want it to be alive in your mind.

MCVEIGH

That’s writing with a poet’s heart.

It is a poet’s heart.

KENNEDY

MCVEIGH

And you are also a poet of course.

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KENNEDY But I’m a narrative poet. I’m in love with resolution. I want to make sure, not in a heavy-handed way, I want to be sure that it works like that: On your terms, you are going to trust me enough to enter that metaphorical little slippage area and for my part I’m giving you no terms other than metaphor to address it. It’s a little butler’s gift to you. I’m just going to put it on the table and back discreetly away and I want you to follow that into the resonances of your own life.

MCVEIGH

When do you know something is finished?

KENNEDY I think it’s when you are ready to share it. The thing with short stories is that I suddenly feel this ping when I’m in touch with my subtext. Like a surge of energy. And when I know I’ve landed that story I feel like a click. And mostly it’s to do with the arrangement of that last line and its imagery. I know that I am thinking about it instinctively.

MCVEIGH

How do you look back on your work now?

KENNEDY Dark Roots has some stories I now look back on and think they’re quite clunky, not that I regret putting them in the collection. With Like a House on Fire I look back and think they are all about fallibility. That’s always going to fascinate me. The way humans fail each other and keep getting up and trying. That’s very heroic to me, just the decision to cope. That’s enough in terms of heroism for me to create a protagonist.

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And dealing with a loss of something. love or something that felt secure and it’s gone. Now what do you do? What about the aftermath of those things? A lot of stories are about the actual drama of an event. I think, yes, but what happened the Wednesday after that? That’s really interesting to me. When all the cameras are gone and there’s just a load of washing to be done. That’s when you see people being heroic. When they’re not observed anymore.

The first collection of stories were written for competitions. They were polished because they’d all won prizes, I guess. The second collection I was happier to be a bit more real and experimental, I suppose. I can understand why the first collection has been selected to be taught in secondary schools here in my home state – I can see how they’re a useful teaching device as the structure is crystal clear. The more recent ones, I think, are not so straightforward.

MCVEIGH

What are you working on now?

KENNEDY I’m very happy with a novella I’ve just finished, about 18,000 words, published in the Australian journal Griffith REVIEW. Very conventional, simple chronology.

I love narrative. I love seeing what I can do to push that narrative. It’s so liberating writing fiction. It’s dipping into that thing which as humans we’re all experts at, if we just shut up and let it run away a bit. In future I’d like to think I’m going to be able to rustle something up with no recipe that’s going to surprise even me. I hope so.

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I look forward to it.

MCVEIGH

KENNEDY So do I. So does my publisher!

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The Savage Dinosaurs of the North A Review of Cyril Dabydeen’s play a song somebody JOSE ALEJANDRO PEREZ DEL CID

W

ho we think we are plays a far bigger role in the appreciation of a narrative than we would like to admit. Our understanding of fiction is extremely limited to cultural context. So if we do not understand what an author is writing about it is because we have nothing in common with them. But this is a good thing.

Some people like their fiction on a placid beach; I enjoyed Dabydeen’s stories during a winter break, up in a cabin two hours north of Stockholm, Sweden. The cold was everywhere, so when I was not reading Dabydeen’s collection, I thumbed through my old copy of Adam Gopnik’s Winter. It’s a book all about the wondrous joys of European-American consciousness and its enjoyment and understanding of itself and this most Northern of seasons. It was only by awesome incalculable chance that I had this book lying around, since it provided me with an explanation for many of the stylistic choices Dabydeen makes.

Dabydeen is constantly shifting perspectives from the Tropics to the North, perhaps in order to address the problem of how the North views the literature and the 216

people of the South. Here is a quote from Gopnik’s Winter: “How can there be a people down there? ­– knowing full well that there are but that the pleasure we take in their idyllic surroundings conspires to suppress, or simplify, their real existence.”

Gopnik is the kind of writer who writes successfully for the general reader, and we can all guess what he means by “we.” In contrast, Dabydeen’s short stories are constantly dealing with his specific point of view, which encompasses both his characters and his potential readers. Yes, it is true that The Caribbean and South America are, to most of “our” imaginations, part of the third world – dark, mysterious, mystical, lawless/irrational, tropical-poorabundant, exotic. But if you come from the Tropics, the North can appear in a very similar light, just substitute two words with technological, unequal, and keep the rest.

It is also true that all the political systems of the South are heavily influenced by Europe, and they also happen to be on the same planet as other first world nations. You can see why I have trouble understanding this divide between the North and South. But still it exists, and with this in mind Dabydeen’s narratives attempt to make the cold white North warm with a tanned understanding that does not come from a bottle or an artificial UV bath.

There are some funny little ironies within the freedom and cosmopolitanism of the sophisticated and enlightened North. Dabydeen’s stories investigate this, like good journalism, and produce strong narratives. Characterization predominates, action is central, paradox rules and subtlety and cultural context is key. One of my favorite stories, “At Swim,” begins with a memory that may just as well be a lie. The main character swims in a manner that causes consternation among the patrons of an indoor pool. By 217

constantly thrashing his right hand in self-defense (like the wounded writer, pen in hand, addressing his critics) and wildly kicking at the water around him, the swimmer positions himself outside the normal. So many people wonder: Why does he swim like that, as if he is fighting an invisible enemy? It turns out that he learned to swim the day right after he was born. When his mother threw him into a river filled with alligators and in his mad scramble to survive, he acquired a mannerism that he cannot get rid off. Nor, does he want to. Memory defines him, but he is not sure if it is true and neither is the reader. The swimmer, who remains nameless, does not see where he was born as defining his identity, unlike the arbitrary nationalism, next level tribalism, of the Western political mind. No, he sees his first and strongest memory as defining who he is, and this is perhaps more cognitively factual, more human, than our tribal-national consciousness.

Dabydeen uses a regional voice that can confuse and turn off some readers, but he explains through his character, “I try to keep up with the others, in my unique rhythm.”

So you might have to do some work to get past the voicing to get a good look at the name less one. This is enjoyable, because it makes me wonder about the regional rhythms that I have experienced both in Sweden and in New York City, where accents are divided by neighborhoods and neighborhoods are divided by race/class affiliation, a tandem for USA consciousness, akin in some ways to the North and South “prestige” divide in Sweden.

Dabydeen’s story makes me wonder what the author’s choice of voicing implies for the people who are actually from a similar region. Do they recognize it as true or false? Is there any importance attributed to a word such as “borning” that lies beyond my grasp? Is it authentic? This 218

character is obviously an immigrant to the North, but by leaving origins vague, Dabydeen deals with the fluidity of consciousness as well as the flux of a moving people.

Dabydeen’s stories deal extensively with relocation. In the opening story, “Mamita’s Garden Cove,” Dabydeen answers the question: Why does one migrate? Obviously, it is because of where one comes from. Dabydeen centralizes the complexity of economic “willful” relocation, through recourse to the idea of the mammalian body, of our central urge to touch and be touched, to be held and to hold, our need to sustain that active warmth of the living body and mind. Within this idea of warmth, so perennial to the tropics, the author incites a certain Tropical paradox: How far would you go to stay warm, to stay alive? Would you move miles away from the equator to cold Canada, and once there what would you do to sustain that heat?

Typically, economic consent and fair trade is all the justification one needs.

A certain group of people (who must remain nameless) are beginning to feel as if they are losing their power in the world, their authentic right to nation and land. The group acts as if it is experiencing a life-threatening siege by some terribly dangerous existential foe, and honestly, I can only compare them to the hapless and justifiably angry insects of Dabydeen’s “At the Edge.”

In it, a technologically primitive exterminator invades “the land of insects” for the cultivation of the precious resource, cacao (don’t worry it’s organic farming). While performing his duty, he encounters a mythical beast: “Coiling and uncoiling. A branch with a life of its own. Eyes, a mottled body; and it was also a strange bird moulting … it assumed the colours of the rainbow.” This story contains somewhat of a satire of the old clichés of mysticism and 219

the rapturing savagery of the tropical South. It takes into account many elements of magical-realism, and reverses some of these roles. The story touches upon the idea of fear. There is no point in me, the reviewer, ruining the exact nature of the horror. The feeling stays with you, it confuses you, and you will react instinctively: each to your own occupation in life, for in the market economy you are what you trade in, and nothing else. Well, unless you’re a citizen.

Fear, whether savage or sophisticated, tends to have much in common with confusion, the mother of wonder, and something that left me both wonderfully confused and afraid to read the book was the opening variation on the shortest-story-ever written “I awoke and the dinosaur was still there.” The quote comes from Augosto Monterroso, who is from Guatemala. He alludes to our physical sense of history, the knowledge that the past was not simply a dream. It is something that is physically present when we are awoken by the necessity of our bodies. Their very own drive for psychosomatic sustenance. For instance, dinosaurs roamed the early continents for far, far, longer than 2.2 million years, which is the entire length of human existence. Let us not even talk about the 5,000 years of the entire length of recorded human history, but does this past haunt us? No, not usually. Usually it is just the recent past.

A thing to keep in mind when reading Dabydeen’s book, is the constant dialogue between the past and the present, between cultures. The book can function as a meta-narrative for the story of its writer. Its organization is a bildungsroman for the North. The stories stretch more than a decade and are chronological, so you might notice simplicity, complexity, confusion, and finally clarity.

Clarity of prose is found especially in those stories that take place predominately in Canada.

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“Oh Canada”, the land of tar-sands production (disastrous for the climate), amazing maple-syrup (diabetes) and the suppression of European-minorities.

Apparently, the Canada is not as sweet as we imagined.

This perennial cultural custom, marginalization, is central to the story “Time to Get Out.” Here you will learn how native-Canadians and ethnics can come together for a common cause. Defying human tradition by forming a coalition of the willing to enforce that same tradition. The story teaches us that it is essential that you must protect your own kind, well at least to the point that it does not negatively affect the profitable. We also get a close look at the workings of, what some here in Sweden consider to be a poisonous rainbow colored snake: multiculturalism!

Stories that are part of the same section as “Time to Get Out,” stand out as they investigate the inner workings of Canadian sociological consciousness when confronted with humanity. What is great about these stories is how much they reminded me of my hometown and of my new home in Stockholm. Apparently there is a Western World, a Gopnik “we,” it is not just some abstraction made up by pop-psychologist and pop-authors.

Dabydeen’s play a song somebody has everything the West is currently obsessed about: gorgeous xenophobia, maladaptive fiscal engineering, and migration! And migration has a wonderful true-Northerner parallel in our first world’s digital-industrial child: the greenhouse effect. “We” know that in North America, due to the increase in global temperature, the Caribbean Mangroves are making their way further and further North, like Dabydeen himself, and it is bringing with it a new era.

Soon the espresso houses of NYC and Stockholm will be able to grow their coffee and cacao beans right outside their doors. Soon consumption and production will be 221

perfectly aligned. You see, it seems that the greatest irony of the North, is that, not only do first world nations want the goods and not the people of the tropics to come and say hello, but “we” also secretly, even consciously, desire the tropic climate and vegetation to migrate, invade, and alter our temperate homes. It is a fair trade indeed. So damn the polar bear, and skål to extinction.

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CONTRIBUTORS Jill Jones has published eight full-length books of poetry including The Beautiful Anxiety and Dark Bright Doors. She won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry (2015), the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize, and the 1993 Mary Gilmore Award. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.

In 2014-15 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University.

Kevin Hart is the author of Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and many more collections. He teaches at the University of Virginia.

Allen Forrest, born in Canada and bred in the U.S., is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University’s Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation’s permanent art collection.

Kenneth Pobo’s new book is Bend Of Quiet. Recent work appears in Floating Bridge, Buenos Aires Review, Comstock Review, Profane Journal, and elsewhere.

David Stallings’s poems have appeared in several North American and U.K. literary journals and anthologies, and in Resurrection Bay, a recent chapbook. “Neighbors” initially appeared in I-70 Review.

Robert Lee Kendrick lives in Clemson. He has published in Kestrel, San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, and Red Earth Review. “Looking at Six Mile Creek” was first published in The Lindenwood Review.

Joe Nicholas is an experimenter, experiencer, and editor of The Screaming Sheep. His work can be found in BOAAT, The Legendary, Profane, Willard & Maple, and other fine magazines. “Psalm of Abraxas” first appeared in pacificREVIEW. Jeffrey Alfier is winner of the 2014 Kithara Book Prize for Idyll for a Vanishing River. He is also author of The Wolf Yearling and The Storm Petrel – Poems of Ireland.

Rachelle Escamilla is the 2014 winner of the Willow Books Literature Prize in poetry. In the Spring of 2014 she was the fashion, arts and food writer for Guangzhou’s premiere arts magazine, In The Red. Pernilla Jansson is a freelance illustrator and holds a BA in Professional English at Stockholm University. She has a fondness for American iconography and Led Zeppelin.

Bradley R. Strahan taught poetry at Georgetown University for 12 years. Has 6 books of poetry & over 600 poems published. This Art of Losing has been translated into French.

Timothy B. Dodd’s poetry has appeared in The Roanoke Review, Big River Poetry Review, Floodwall, William and Mary Review, and elsewhere.

Lucy Durneen is a writer and lecturer based at Plymouth University, England. Her work has appeared in The Manchester Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Letters Page and Short Fiction.

Vincent Cavalieri’s short fiction has been featured in numerous Microsoft Word documents. A rigorous calculation suggests he has met .000047 percent of all the people on Earth (which is below average).

Benjamin Schmitt’s poetry has been published in Grist Journal, Solo Novo, The Monarch Review, Blue Lyra Review, Packingtown Review, and elsewhere.

Jonathan Greenhause received a 2014 Willow Review Award, Prism Review’s 2012-2013 Poetry Prize, and was a finalist in The Southeast Review’s 2013 Gearhart Poetry Contest.

Enaiê Mairê Della Torre Azambuja graduated in English and Lusophone Literatures and Languages, with emphasis in Translation Studies, at Federal University of Paraná.

Isaac Alvidrez lives in the border between USA and Mexico, constantly crossing bridges between both worlds.

Michael Mirolla is the author of a clutch of novels, and short story and poetry collections, which are s a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction.

Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney and has lived in Italy, Ghana, France, Belgium and Somalia. Pelt and Other Stories was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize 2014 and Semi-Finalist in the Hudson Prize.

Robert Joe Stout’s books are Miss Sally; Blood of the Serpent: Mexican Lives; Why Immigrants Come to America; Running Out the Hurt; A Perfect Throw; Hidden Dangers; and Where Gringos Don’t Belong.

Sunil Sharma is a writer based in Mumbai, India. He is a college principal and has published three books of poetry, a book of shorts, and a novel.

Zuo You is a Chinese poet now based in Xi’an. His poems have appeared in some major literary magazines in China. He is hearing-impaired and can only speak a few simple words.

Zhu Jian is a Chinese poet now based in Xi’an, particularly known for his vivid short poems. He is an organizer of Chang’an Poetry Festival.

Changming Yuan, the 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.

Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, New Contrast, Poetry Salzburg Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and many other. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).

Loren Francis is an internationally-based songwriter, musical artist, and carpenter as likely to be found in Nashville as he is in Stockholm or the Maine woods.

Jose Alejandro Perez del Cid is a Guatemalan national residing in New York City, and occasionally, when the gods of the economy permit, Stockholm, Sweden. He is also a freelance graphic artist.

Paul McVeigh’s work has been featured on BBC4. His first novel The Good Son is forthcoming with Salt Publishing.

Hooman Azizi was born in Iran and now lives in Sweden. He has published one poetry collection and two novels in Farsi. They have been banned in Iran, but then came out with The Iranian Underground Literature Publication.

Annette Willis explores issues and themes through narrative photo essays featuring images that are often deliberate lyrical abstractions.

She has had twelve solo exhibitions at galleries in Australia and has had work shown in London, New York and at the 3rd International Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography in Malaga, Spain.

Mark Axelrod is a professor of Comparative Literature at Chapman University. For sixteen years he has been the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing which has received five National Endowment for the Arts Grants.

Yi Zhe writes in both English and Chinese, and now teaches at Changsha New Oriental School. His publication includes Westerly, an Australian literary magazine listed in A&HCI. Angela Sherlock has written a collection of stories called Exports, which explores the Irish Diaspora.

G端l Bilge Han is scholar from Turkey, specialised in Wallace Stevens.

Her drawings usually depict imaginary life forms between animal and plant species, and their mutual coexistence in anomalous environments.