Two Thirds North 2016

2016

in this issue

Robyn Bolam Gary Allen Troy Jollimore Darrell Bourque

TWO THIRDS NORTH

2016

TWO THIRDS NORTH 2016

SENIOR editors

publisher

associate editors

Paul Schreiber, Adnan Mahmutović Department of English, Stockholm University & Cinnamon Press Anna Crofts, Norah Shagir, Vilasini Roy, Caroline Prag Örman, Kallie Red-Horse, Aleksandra Oletić, Anna Nisslert, Anton Marra, Mirela Karagić, Pernilla Jansson, Viktoria Garvare, Andrea Bressanelli

ISBN 978-1-909077-98-0 ISSN 2001-8452 (Print) ISSN 2001-8460 (Online) Cover by Brandon Straus. Pp. 82 and 104 by Meho Mahmutović. P. 58 “Moments Dreams are Made of ” by Walter Jack Savage. P. 198 courtesy of National Museum of Iceland. P. 40 art by Pernilla Jansson.

CONTENTS Editor’s Foreword, Paul Schreiber

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history’s scr aps Adeline Blanchard’s Son-in-Law, II, Darrell Bourque

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Odour of Soil, Ian C. Smith

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Sonoran Valley Redemption, Jeffrey Alfier

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I. Destruction: Famagusta, Rowan Johnson

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Between Four and Five o’clock, 10 th August 1628, Stockholm Harbour, Robyn Bolam

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Derry, Gary Allen

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Banja Luka: The City of Oblivion and Disdain, Srđan Šušnica

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Post-Traumatic, Domenic Scopa

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Wearing My Life like a Hand-Me-Down, Ian C. Smith

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Charleston, June 2015, Darrell Bourque

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John X. Johnson Tells the Story of His Name, Jason Namey

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II. Chaos: Thessaloniki, Rowan Johnson

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Birds of Thunder, Robert Pope

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Ceremonies Ceremony, Troy Jollimore 76 This Is How You Ask Me to Pray, Kelli Allen

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Physics 101, Tom Montag

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The Strange Lullaby of Dr. Lennart Nilsson, Heather Altfeld

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Sacrifice, Liesl Nunns 83 You Are Sitting at the Table, Tim Robbins

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Work that Hurts, Andy Smart 100 III. Kipo Beach: Samothrace, Rowan Johnson

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The Grandmaster of Gaza, Tom Vowler 105 Photographs, Alexandra Larsson Jacobson

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As We See, Ourselves IV. Eastanbul, Rowan Johnson 124 Above White Soil Beach, Carl Boon 126 Testament of Innocence, Ian C. Smith

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Sometimes, as We Move Closer to Autumn, Kelli Allen

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Walking through the Morning, Kelli Allen

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The Germans Are Coming, Sybil Baker 133 Charybdis, Valentina Cano 145 Camping in the Desert, Kari Wergeland 146 River Country, Jeffrey Alfier 148 Shabbat, Valentina Cano 150 Consider the Mayfly, Milton Montague

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Vertigo, Maja Lukić 152 Big as Life, Derek Sugamosto 154 Tonight, Tom Bradstreet & Åsa Samuelsson

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Tr anslations Basil Bunting’s Shadow, Robyn Bolam 160 The Beetle, George Neary 162 Europa, Mel Perry 164 Afrah and Furat, Tim Robbins 166 Time Is a River without Banks, Lucy Durneen

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Quoi Faire, Darrell Bourque 181 Speaking in Tongues Glossolalia, Maja Lukić 184 What I Try, Troy Jollimore 186 The Pathology of Poetry, Heather Altfeld

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The Earthquakes, Kimberly Kruge 190 Devour the Tongue beneath the Sea, Isabella Bjelkstrand

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Synaptic Mechanisms for Plasticity in the Neocortex, M. C. Rush 192 North Westerly, Mel Perry 195 Ineffable, Peycho Kanev 196 The King of the Ball, Friðrik Sólnes Jónsson

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REVIEW Essay

“More fun than scissored silhouettes,” Review of Hula Hooping by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, Jason S. Polley

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Contributors 212

Editor’s Foreword

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ere in Stockholm, two-thirds into the darkness of Nordic winter, literary voices bring us visions once again from so many other latitudes. Clustered under rubrics that may capture a sense of resonances, you will find voices that arise from diverse places and backgrounds.

This year our poetry and fiction come from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – reversed in their antipodal seasons from us – as well as from Britain and Bosnia, Ireland and Iceland, Sweden and the United States, and from writers who now reside in Mexico, Turkey and Hong Kong. This transnational convergence is what we aspire to at Two Thirds North. history’s scraps, a phrase from Ian C. Smith’s “Odour of Soil” suggests the many memories and stories we bear with us and tell in order to account for our lives. Sometimes these scraps act as fragments shored against our vulnerable mortality or shifting identities. Many works in this section account for the loss of loved ones, or instants in history that may lost, as in Robyn Bolam’s image of a sailor on the sinking ship Vasa, or Srđan Šušnica’s family history in Banja Luka during the Balkan War. Rowan Johnson’s “Postcards from the Ottoman Empire” starts here with scraps of history from Cyprus, but travels into other sections of the volume like postcards received over time and from different places. ceremonies takes its rubric from Troy Jollimore’s poem on the frightening rite of marriage, but these works also recognize how ceremonies – formal or unconsciously performed – negotiate so many of our relationships, above 6

all in families. These ceremonies may be as subtle as a chess game between father and daughter in “The Grandmaster of Gaza” by Tom Vowler, or as destructive as a father’s ritual isolation in “Work that Hurts” by Andy Smart. as we see, ourselves includes works that explore sight and self-vision that we hold close to the heart of our publication. Then there are simple observations of the phenomenal world that all too typically disappears into the habitual, and bring it back to life through an attentiveness that defamiliarizes that world, even if in a kind of vertigo.

As a rewrite of Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, Tom Bradstreet and Åsa Samuelsson’s “Tonight” plays with self-reflection that comes with moving within or across cultural borders, within and across faiths and literary traditions. In other works, more critical reflections arise in contact with cultural points of reference that are not our own.

We are always looking for and have published good poetry translations to English, but this year the section translations is more about forms of personal change across cultural lines, from Robyn Bolam’s received spirit of the poet Basil Bunting, to Darrell Bourque’s transformation through Louisiana creole or “La la” music, over the lines of race and language. speaking in tongues takes its cue from Maja Lukic’s poem “Glossolalia,” and leads us to the condition of poet and writer always trying to say what cannot be said, and yet the need to speak. Here works try to capture the voices of natural phenomena, of earthquakes and wind, or suffer the restraining constructs of language against a natural force.

We are proud that these voices, however local they may be in their rootedness or global in their power to transgress borders, are featured in Two Thirds North.

Paul Schreiber 7

history’s scraps

Adeline Blanchard’s Son-in-Law, II Darrell Bourque I had just served us each a piece of sweet dough pie when Fedo pushed from the table & stood by his chair & then went down hard. Without so much as a sigh he was gone. Iry heard more than he saw, was aware something big had just left the dimly-lighted room.

Fedo was a hard man & held long grudges & loved oddly. The day Wilma left to marry the blind groom who was a musician to boot, he didn’t even glove his hate with so much as a glance. She was in her tomb as far as he was concerned & yet here we had woven some kind of odd rope that held us all together. Why Iry still loved him as he did, I just don’t know. The pair never touched & here was Iry almost singing that highpitched wail, holding Fedo in his arms & gasping for air.

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Odour of Soil Ian C. Smith Some of us drink, toasting history’s scraps to keep from catching on fire, troubled witness on a long blue couch, nerves juicing down to one wire.

Wallpaper hiding nothing, a pattern repeated skein after skein & outside, autumn’s garden, silent, too beautiful to bear after rain.

Don’t bother treading that unlit path ghosts can be seen through the glass, the shimmer of filial mistakes, unfinished strain of the past.

Pigeons sidestep on the shed roof, reminder of a dead man’s toil, stains, cast-off unforgiven things, on his hands an odour of soil.

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Sonoran Valley Redemption Jeff Alfier We hauled those boulders out of arid playa, needing ground to build stables to board stallions. A rattler froze our steps till it met the blunt edge of Pablo’s spade.

His faults are legion, that flunked soul. When his will shatters like the flask his boot hides, we pull him back from the brink, bad wine and red eyes of an angry wife. He knows horses, good reefer peddled under tables in El Salto. When we sent him to Nogales for mares, he went cunning to auctions, drove hard miles through valleys till his eyes shone with agave wine and ballads from more than one bar in Naco, but our trailer bright with fresh horses, alfalfa bales stolen at night from fields.

Listen: if we don’t build stalls soon, fetch a fair price for lumber in this rain-clean wind, our tune will sour.

Look away mere seconds and we could be gone, this ground fossiled back to greasewood and coachwhip, knowing we’re beat. But we’ve got Pablo’s faith and enough of our own to endure storms that runnel down the earth.

Monsoons soak this valley hard. Let arroyos flood. Men will claim this desert’s Eden redeemed, wolves and eagles drifting north from Mexico over borders dissolved by illegal feet. Mesquite and coyotes know better.

Know these rains cease in sere wind, whipping dust devils that scour cutbanks. So we let horizons fix our stares

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till deer jump through the driftwood we gather for twilight fires, till we peddle luck and horses through August drought, a prayer that wind will cool, our gains will go unnumbered, hope not turning to bone on some nameless, vanished river.

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Postcards from the Ottoman Empire

I. DESTRUCTION: Famagusta Rowan Johnson

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n the evening after the sunny Cyprus day, the man from Larnaca sees the sliver of the moon over the old city for the first time. He’s drinking in the rooftop pool of the Portofino Hotel, where a vicious easterly wind marauds across the Mediterranean so the birdcage at the bar sways until almost horizontal. The sky grows cloudy and the moon disappears, so he descends to the basement nightclub.

The roaring wind fades and drowns out inside the club.

Drink after drink of Chivas Regal fills his blood as The Rolling Stones blare through the speakers. At six in the morning he staggers out of the club and back up to the swimming pool on the roof. The solitary elevator seems permanently stuck in between the second and third floors so he takes the hotel staircase littered with ceiling plaster and broken bottles from the storm.

On the roof, the once pristine pool is now filled with water so dark, it seems to be in the depths of a cave. The poolside loungers have been scattered like ashes in every direction, one of them jutting incongruously over the edge 15

of the roof. The rooftop is a mess of broken wood, smashed glass, and litter of every kind.

He kicks aside some of the rubble and surveys the city walls of old Famagusta in the early morning sun, still intact and sturdy, dutifully protecting the churches and tombs inside. In 1974, this part of town had not been the target of the Turks, for they wanted to preserve their own history.

Now, 40 years later, he still sometimes hears the rat-a-tat of the choppers’ blades overhead.

In the other direction, the starry tourist hotels and bars that used to fill Greek Famagusta can no longer be distinguished or even recognized. That day so long ago, the man’s father was sipping his coffee in his kafenio, which was bombed to a naked ruin. Probably the ruined wreckage is still lying there on the street.

Today, only the piteous cries of the caged bird at the pool break the silence. In the morning haze, he dreams about one day when he will open a kafenio of his own in Larnaca, selling orange juice to tourists.

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Between Four and Five o’clock, 10 th August 1628, Stockholm Harbour Robyn Bolam A hull of a thousand oaks, only four of her ten sails set, yet a gust of wind bore her down and the Vasa sank to the seabed.

No-one had wanted to tell the King, who was away from home, that the men sent to test his fine new ship, crusted with carvings

by German craftsmen, had stopped running along the deck after only three circuits when it lurched to tip them in the water.

No-one had wanted to disappoint crowds cramming the harbour for the celebrations, or to send their families home, who had special leave to be aboard. Blindly, they sailed towards five o’clock.

The helmsman, a deck below, could see sky but not where he was going, felt timbers strain as he leant to pull the whipstaff and turn Vasa into the wind to right her. Canvas cracked above him.

His legs set, heavy with fear. The seaman with the conn was calling down through the companion, voice warping in panic. The helmsman gasped up into the small hatchway before its short ladder to the square of sky, which he could easily have reached, lay down, before sea flooded in to meet him. He stood his deck, while their shouts and screams flowed into his lungs. For over three hundred years, mud preserved his courage.

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Derry Gary Allen This line of young men in cut-down suits against the station wall one good overcoat between them, they look hard, like Maltese East-enders with fashioned cutthroats in their inside pockets but this is thirty-nine, and the border hasn’t been there that long and must be defended inch by inch by hard young men from the boxing-clubs, the new factories, and the urbanization of country market-towns and hilltop housing-estates who see Orangism as defunct in this new-fangled Europe of high-rise flats and Kindergartens and totalitarianism and left-wing politics that hackles like ball bearings down the spine they smile, before the shutter clicks and the train leaves for Derry.

Everything from their fathers’ age was spiritual the thumping footfalls on the Meeting House floors the Temperance movements, the baptismal revivals like everybody everywhere we were God’s chosen people because of what we suffered and because of what we chose one step in one direction from rock or hedge churches to blackberry mouths and clearances and immigration or workhouses and tramp steamers to the shipbuilding yards of Scotland or new worlds forged from bitterness, and the bottle of sweet sherry passed around on a summer morning between young men on a day-return outing who couldn’t care less about boundaries or cows heat-still in the fields of rushes and poor grass but laughed at Emanuel inflating condoms he would never use dropping them like depth-charges down the line

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as they broke porcelain sinks at the Derry station tried to kiss shirt-factory girls on the bridge and were chased from a greasy spoon out of the Bogside back onto the walls of a lost city that didn’t know it was lost an incursion, a scouting raid, all along the Donegal border not sure of what treacherous turns the map took but satisfied in each other’s bleeding and up for the fight Ulster first like a third-class steam train ticket on a country train that seemed to run round and round on itself I mean, after all, none of them had relations south of the border or even a mile in any direction out of town, so that when the train finally came about face again, they would find themselves older in space if not in time, demobbed and senseless and none the wiser tramping a summer morning into roadside dust.

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Banja Luka

The City of Oblivion and Disdain Essay Srđan Šušnica I am a proud son of Partisans y grandmother and grandfather Šušnica were proud residents of the Bosnian Krajina from the villages of Dabar and Podlug, close to the Grmeč Mountain. Both of them joined the Yugoslav Partisans at 16 in World War II. Grandfather Djuro, along with his four brothers, joined the Sixth Krajina Brigade. Grandmother Mira joined the Proletarian Brigade and was wounded at the battle of the Sutjeska in consecutive fights with Četniks and the Germans. She survived typhus while retreating with what remained of the Dalmatian brigade. They met and married at the end of the war.

My grandfather undertook garrison service first on the Bulgarian and then the Albanian border. My father was born in Pirot and, together with his brother, grew up in Tetovo. When they came to Banja Luka in 1960, they spoke Macedonian but understood Serbo-Croatian. They were true Partisans and communists who took care of their neighbourhood and friends and thoroughly enjoyed their shared life with all the peoples of Bosnia. These beliefs weren’t swayed at the onset of the faithless 1990s. They

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were never religious, nor did they have any traces of a nationalist construction of Serbianhood.

Looking back, I know that they, like everyone from the Krajina, saw themselves as Orthodox Serbs, but gave this neither political nor existential meaning. Their ethnography, culture, and economic circumstances during the 20th century were incredibly far from the monolithic and homogenizing political construct of Serbianhood which emanated from Belgrade and Vojvodina during the 1920s and 30s, and later 1980s and 90s. On the contrary, their experience was truly Bosnian, or more precisely, Krajina Bosnian.1 I remember my grandmother’s comment on a photo of Četniks and Serbian volunteers on the barricades in Croatia in 1991. Son, she told me, these bearded Četniks and priests are back. I thought that we’d triumphed over all that once and for all. They’ll come for our heads.

My mother’s father Ostoja joined the Partisans at 16 as well, along with a doctor called Mladen, and participated in the uprising on Kozara Mountain. He survived the first Nazi, Ustaša, and Četnik offensive on that mountain.

When he returned to his village, reprisals had begun.

Prisoners of war, anti-fascists, and villagers were killed or taken to the concentration camps at Stara Gradiška and Jasenovac. Men—my grandfather among them—were sent to work camps in Austria and Germany. He escaped after four months and returned to the Partisans, first with the Slovenians and then back to Bosnia.

An oasis of variety hen I think of my childhood, I always remember the experiences and friends from the two Banja Luka neighbourhoods where I grew up, Rosulja and Borik. My nicest and most nostalgic memories are

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from the working class neighbourhood of Borik, where I spent my sweet, pre-war teenage years. The river Vrbas, the kayak club, my friends Mufta, Muhamed, Sina, Smailaga, Albin, Boro, Pota. Kayak competitions on rivers all over the former Yugoslavia. Playing with friends from my building: Jimmy, Smaja, Roske, Darma…

First loves and crushes. I remember a girl called Elizabeth Sotelo, who we called Betty Boop. The mere mention of her name made my ears red. Banja Luka and Borik of my childhood were, compared to the city now, an oasis of various people, names, family stories, customs, and histories, different beliefs and narratives, different temperaments.

I remember how, on the eve of the war, everyone in Banja Luka had started their own small business. People made and exported bedsheets, leather goods, and who knows what else. Cafés and patisseries were busy and successful, especially the ones in Borik: K4, Venecija, Monet, Kayak, Tilt, Džoj, and Moskva. Things were good until they started to promise us that we’ll soon be eating with golden spoons.

Then more than half of my friends left the neighbourhood.

Twilight of the golden spoons started high school in the fall of 1991, which is where I experienced the first shocks of the war. I remember how my classroom friends disappeared one by one. And then, a few days or a week later, someone brings the news that Selma, or Valentin, or Mario won’t be returning to school and that they’d left Banja Luka. These were traumas for me.

It was in high school that they first started categorizing us by nationality. Sometime in May 1992, my teacher Mile Sumrak, vice principal and member of the SDS party (Serbian Democratic Party), entered our classroom and

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said, Come on kids, write down your name and nationality here, and circulated a paper. When it finally came to me I realized for the first time that children aren’t only children but Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. I was so shocked I couldn’t move.

Now I know that these exclamations of nationality were the first step in the process of dehumanization. I didn’t know which category I belonged to and wrote down that I was a Yugoslav. Bojan, sitting next to me, did the same.

Sumrak took the list and left, but came back after a short while, and told Bojan and me that the Yugoslav nationality didn’t exist, that the country no longer existed, and that we’d have to identify differently. I told him that I didn’t know what else to write and that I’d ask my mother, and left class confused.

Now I think how symbolic it is that all the woe and suffering of Serb nationalism and the war was brought into our classroom by someone whose last name literally meant “twilight.” In 1992, half of my class disappeared, as well as a lot of my Banja Luka. The twilight of war cleaned up the streets, neighbourhoods, villages, and memories. And still today Serb nationalism tries to sell us the story that those times, those people, those children, and that life never existed, and that things are better now.

‘I don’t know why or for what’ or me, the beginning of the war is symbolized by my cousin Boris, the child of a mixed marriage, who ended up going from a Yugoslav Army barrack to Vukovar at the age of 18. He was a tank operator and survived his post, returning home in 1991. He had stories that made me sick of the whole thing. He said, We came into Vukovar in tanks at the very beginning. I don’t know why or for what, but there I am. Bullets start hitting the

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tank and my foot slips off the gas. The tank stops, I start crying. Fuck, I think, where are they taking me? The whole column stops, and Officer Šljivančanin yells at all of us like a slavedriver.

That winter, my father managed to pick up Andrej, a young man from Belgrade, from the front near Strug. He brought him home and told me, Get him ready. He’s going home today so he doesn’t get killed.

He literally took him off an armoured car and brought him to Banja Luka. The boy had mud in his hair and ears, his eyes like saucers, shaking. He put on civilian clothes and his earring and left for Belgrade. I think he lives in Italy now. We still have his soldier’s letters.

People of all ethnicities who were recruited in Banja Luka in 1992 increasingly started returning from Croatia in coffins. I remember the trees in Petar Kočić Park plastered with obituaries.

Went to bed with a five-pointed star and woke up wearing Serbian insignia n March 1992 my dad and I went fishing on the Pliva River with dad’s colleague Zoka from the Interior Ministry. On the road, Zoka ejected the cassette of Merima Njegomir and put in one of some Četnik songs.

My dad asked him, When did you start listening to this?

Zoka replied that he’d always listened to such stuff. I laughed from the back of the Yugo 45 and said, Sure you did, but on a Walkman!

I saw my father’s angry look in the rearview mirror. He slapped me and I shut up until we got home. My father made me stand in front of him and told me I had to be careful what I said to people. I’ve never heeded this advice.

The majority of Serbs simply went to bed with a fivepointed (Partisan) star and woke up wearing Serbian

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insignia. When they realized what had happened to them it was too late. All other stories are attempts at justifying why Partisans and communists became Četniks and nationalists.

In April 1992, my family experienced the zest of Serbian nationalism. My father, Miodrag Šušnica, was killed by paramilitary forces of the SDS, the so-called SOS, by the order of Stojan Župljanin and the upper echelons of the SDS. The local press pinned the murder on Muslims and Croats from Banja Luka. After the murder, our apartment was searched several times, my father’s belongings removed, and my mother followed. My father’s police colleagues and friends managed to solve the murder, but the case was never heard before a court. The perpetrators, organizers, and accomplices share this city with me. To make things more absurd, the article which accused and then dehumanized Muslims and Croats was written by our family friend, Boro Matić. When my mother asked him why he was lying, he responded that he had to. We’ve had no contact with him since.

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Friends and neighbours renounced hat April in 1992 was the beginning of organized terror tactics and expulsions of non-Serbs from Banja Luka. I lost friends from the neighbourhood, from the theatre club, from school. By the end of the war 220 people were killed in Banja Luka and 75,000 expelled just because they were Muslim or Croat. And Banja Luka didn’t see even one day of warfare. Serbs renounced their friends and neighbours for an imaginary Serbianhood.

I witnessed how a group of nationalists walked through town forcing boys to cross themselves, beating them if they fumbled or did it in the wrong way. I remember them pulling down boys’ underwear to see if they were circumcised, beating them if they were. I watched how they threw people out of their apartments, broke into their houses, beat them with rifles on the streets, and took them to who knew where.

I remember when the Ferhadija mosque was demolished, along with a few other mosques one day in May 1993. The windows of the surrounding buildings were shattered, except for the glass of the Interior Ministry, which knew the mosque would be demolished and opened their windows.

I couldn’t believe it and didn’t want to. Some celebrated, some cried.

I remember the day when our neighbours the Kalkanis and my friend Samir left Banja Luka. The morning was quiet. The Džonlić family left shortly after. Samir’s brother was hiding from the army and didn’t go out at all except to change hiding places. He hid at our house too. He was what was called a floater—someone who lives in the parts of town where they wouldn’t recognize that he was Muslim or Croat. Foreigners were good at categorising.

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Organized amnesia ow, in 2015, Banja Luka doesn’t resemble the old one. During the war, the new Serbian government had erased all Muslim and Croat names—as well as those that did not sound Serbian enough—from streets, community centres, and schools. They demolished every mosque in Banja Luka and the Francisan monastery in Petričevac. At the diocese in the city, eight Catholic priests were killed, while others were imprisoned and tortured. In September 1992, Serb nationalists arrested a prominent imam in the middle of a street.

In the years after the war, they demolished or neglected cultural monuments, sculptures of Bosnian artists, medieval fortresses, and old Bosnian houses. Almost every vestige of anything Ottoman, Muslim, Catholic, Austrian, or Bosnian was destroyed. Partisan monuments were also targets of organized amnesia, although a few years after the war some of the busts of national heroes were returned to Banja Luka, which isn’t the case elsewhere. Anything speaks to a prior inter-ethnic and communal life and heritage has been deliberately forgotten.

Archives and police and court records were burned, at first for money and for fun, and later systematically and on a mass scale. The sheer amount of what Banja Luka wishes to forget is so big that the emptiness formed by it cannot be filled, not even by new pop-mythologies or nationalist narratives and monuments. In addition to all the new Orthodox churches, Banja Luka got a monument of Stefan Nemanja, a 12th century Grand Prince of a Serbian medieval principality later canonised by the Serbian Orthodox Church, and Ban Milosavljević, a politician perceived by many as the moderniser of the city during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Serbian flags can be seen everywhere, while Bosnian flags fly only on state institutions.

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The poisoning continues y own research demonstrates that Serbian officials in Banja Luka changed the names of 50% of the city’s streets, around 240 of them, removing all non-Serb narratives and replacing them exclusively with

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Serb and Orthodox ones. This is maybe one of the most visible examples of urbicide and culturecide in Banja Luka, especially for the city’s oldest residents who are witnessing the change. It’s uncomfortable for me to live on a street named after a Četnik from World War II, let alone for someone whose family was expelled or killed by the Serb army.

In the last six or seven years, Milorad Dodik’s domination of public and media space has completely poisoned the political arena and young people with clerical nationalism and ethno-fascism. Simultaneously, Dodik and his clique breezily steal public money and resources under the guise of nationalist populism. Dodik and his tycoons have for years moved their wealth and assets across borders to Serbia, Russia, and Switzerland.

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Why? lenty of people in Banja Luka don’t accept this nationalist bullshit, and it’s among them that I’ve made my friends. We try to mark incidents and places and raise public consciousness of the crimes and genocide committed against non-Serbs in Banja Luka, Prijedor, Srebrenica, and other towns in Republika Srpska. Along with our neighbours—Bosniaks and Croats—we mark the sufferings of all people in Bosnia, though I focus on the crimes committed against non-Serbs by Serbs in the name of Serbianhood.

Why? Because our children will be ashamed of what we committed on the eve of the 21st century. The Serb governments and armed forced of the 1990s, taking over and cleansing town by town in Croatia and Bosnia in a hallucinogenic revelry of defense of so-called Serbian land, has devalued Serbian victims of Jasenovac, Jadovno, and other places of loss. Günter Grass told the Germans: Only when you truly feel shame for what was done in your name and you experience real catharsis, only then do you have the right to your own tears.

Is there any such reckoning in Banja Luka, in Republika Srpska, in Serbia? No! If there was, Banja Luka wouldn’t be part of RS, and RS would not exist, because people would renounce the most shameful period in Serbian history. And that city wouldn’t be the centre of denial of genocide and systematic war crimes. It would not be a city of amnesia and forgetting of all that is not Serbian.

We can all call on humanity and on the five-pointed star, on Tito and the Partisans, but our wartime leaders were über-Četniks, über-nationalists, and madmen. The current ruling political elite in Banja Luka and in Serbia is hardly different in their ideology from those war criminals—just their methods and masks have been somewhat refined.

I fear new conflicts in Bosnia.

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1. Editor’s note: The Bosnian Krajina, or literally “ borderland,” is the historic region at the edges of the Ottoman and AustroHungarian empires. It was mainly populated by Serbs who served as militia for imperial armies, and the region is known for the large number of uprisings and revolts against colonial rule. The Krajina was also the site of fierce resistance to the fascist regime in WWII, and one of the most ethnically diverse Partisan movements in Yugoslavia.

Photographs copyright by Srđan Šušnica.

Photo 1: Post-war monument in honour of a historical Serb figure Stefan Nemanja, here covered by activists.

Photo 2: Graffiti in Banja Luka, with words “only Serbs.”

Photo 3: A square in Banja Luka renamed into Serb Heroes’ Square.

Photo 4: It is typical on some houses in Banja Luka to have the original and new street name and number. The one in Cyrilic letters is the new name.

Photo 5: Post-WWII monument to Partizan heroes with graffity made by activists stating, “On 22 April 1945 Banja Luka was liberated by anti-facists and not Četniks.”

The original text was written for Belgrade daily magazine Danas.

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Post-Traumatic Domenic Scopa When I look at stars I think of my father, trapped by the seatbelt in the ambulance he drove, watching his partner burn to death in the passenger seat, in an ocean of flames that moves with the moon.

My father. Struggling.

To free himself. Red blood in his mouth.

The night as black as charred skin.

He couldn’t have known the apartment my mother and I would move into after the divorce, the stars invisible in a smoggy sky— would never see my back lashed with the calligraphy of scars from sexual abuse I suffered there.

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I was seven. My father crashed the ambulance.

City lights obscured light from already dead stars — his partner cracked in half, body curled into that final position burning things so perfectly assume.

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Wearing My Life like a Hand-MeDown Ian C. Smith The boy who lived near the silenced air-raid siren where I broke my arm crashing my sister’s old bike, dared drivers by sauntering in front of them, risking being run over, a fate I dreaded after seeing a run-over dog, its blank eye bulged.

Outside Sunday School the usual burnt sugar smell diminished, the jam factory closed until Monday, came a screech of brakes, a sickening thud when that boy rode his luck, and a Wolseley’s grille.

His sensible sister rode in the ambulance with him, our mob rocketing home with the dramatic news to parents who chose to dig in a miniature garden, prepare a roast, rather than cleanse their sins, our wasted junior scripture their chance for a break.

During our mad dash home running was impeded by clutching my collar because my sensible sister instilled in me a rule that we must not let go until we saw a dog after seeing an ambulance or our mother would die, which I later disproved shamefully, to my slight relief due to the number of ambulances seen often from the bus, and dogs, although numerous, hiding when I needed them most.

The T-shirt had not yet emigrated from America.

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Like ours, the boy’s family emigrated to dry Australia where he became a policeman near where I lived, an arresting irony that made my mind smile.

I inherit my rogue son’s hand-me-down Tees, making the most of irresponsibility.

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Charleston, June 2015 Darrell Bourque I am the twice hammered drunk.

I try to push past the news coming at me through a screen l trust less & less. I keep telling myself that that screen itself or news Itself is not intelligence & that I have to take belief & faith & hope beyond images I see of a white boy praying before he stood inside a prayer circle inside Mother Emanuel to distance one old woman from everyone who’d ever known her or didn’t know her at all until she became news, to still the five year old who chewed the inside of her mouth to play dead as her aunt told her to, to drop the youngest man in the nine whose division was marked by ancient epithet he knew not to be true as he understood truth at the moment he fell to the floor, at the moment others fell, at the moment

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a hateful boy left the church, & Pastor Pinckney & us too on the edge of the ocean.

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John X. Johnson Tells the Story of His Name Jason Namey At the Adult Film Awards, JXJ gives a farewell speech ere, sweetie, hold my drink. {looks at the audience then back at the girl} Hold my drink, I said. Never mind, just never mind. Give it here. There we go. {adjusts microphone} Good evening everybody. It’s an absolute fucking honor to be taking this stage for the last time. {readjusts microphone, glances sideways} There is one thing, not only one thing, but one thing I’ve learned after many years in this fine industry. People will never stop asking how I got this gig. That’s all they want to talk about. Guys, mostly, because somewhere along the lines a girl told these butterballs it was so big and that we can fuck for so long. And they haven’t learned yet that some girls just say that to everyone. No need to spoil their hubris, I just give them the Lord’s truth, You’re too old. It’s like playing an instrument: if you wanna get paid, you gotta start real early. And to the ones who are still young enough, well their moms have scurried over and dragged ‘em off by the ear before I can even begin on the pros and cons of coming in missionary.

Even when I’m in the frozen fruit aisle of Walmart,

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trying to get my five a day like anyone else, one backward glance at me and these Holier-Than-Thous think that I just fucking exude satanic virtues. They don’t remember that on Sundays and Wednesdays, I’m right there in the church pew next to them, putting my cash in the basket like any other one of God’s own. {takes sip, spits out piece of lime} But some people really are just curious and hey, I don’t blame ‘em. Because it’s a lifestyle that makes no sense at all, and it makes all the sense in the world. Simultaneously.

Like the liar paradox, Schrödinger’s cat, Law of the Excluded Middle type of shit.

You know the scene: a civilian is lying next to you in that placid post-coital hum. The metallic smell of sweat.

Humid sheets. Asking the way you ask about bumps and scars as you each run hands over the other’s naked body.

And here’s what I say to them.

When I was eleven years old, right after my mom died from lung cancer, I said to my dad, I want to do porn and you might as well know now.

He leaned against his rake and said, You’re your own man. If joining that cockamamie business is what you aim to do, well, that’s your screw to set.

I asked how I could get into it, and it’s not like he would have known more than anybody else—he managed a hardware store—but he was my Dad so I asked him. He looked at me and asked, You still a virgin?

I said No. And he said, Pull down your pants and let me have a look.

I pulled down my pants. Leaves crinkled when they fell to my feet. Then he peeked down his own overalls—he wore them with nothing underneath— and said, Well son, if that thing don’t make you lots of money it’ll sure make 42

you lots of friends. And goddamn if I ain’t the proudest I’ve ever been excluding the time your brother Mark died from friendly fire in Desert Storm.

And I said, Please don’t say G.D., Dad. God is listening.

And he said, I hope he’s listening because I do damn him. I damn him straight to hell for what he’s took from me. But I’ll watch my mouth around you, son, because we’re two grown men living together like roommates and that means we respect each other’s wishes. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, Look, son, you got time to work up to it. You ain’t over the hill just yet. But here’s my advice: if you can masturbate in a room full of people and come on demand, I think you should have what it takes and by the way you can pull your pants back up now.

Oh, I said and eyed the dirt beneath my toenails. I could smell the ash from his first batch of burnt compost. That was the best advice I ever got. And I mean, you think that you’ll get shy, all those eyes on you. But before I even got my first paying gig, I was getting off on the exhibitionism of the thing, like reverse fucking voyeurism.

The first time I caught this was on Spring Break when I was sixteen. Course it wasn’t my Spring Break cause I sure as hell wasn’t still wasting my time with their bullshit multiplication tables. I’m self-educated. But a college girl came to this house out in Panama City these frat guys were renting (we’d met on the beach and I was selling them quote-unquote ecstasy).

The mixed scent of menthols and suntan lotion. The verdant taste of gin. Her bitter tongue. One drink led to another led to us fucking on the couch while the guys stood around drinking warm Corona and watching— crushing and snorting the antacids I sold them, saying, This is good shit yeah I can feel it already taste that drip in the back of your throat.

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Someone took a polaroid. You can’t see much, just my white ass up in the air and her pimply legs sticking out. I still have it on my bathroom mirror. I came like a whore to salvation. Embarrassing quick. Elementary school quick. But I didn’t give a shit. I could barely remember her face a week after but I’ll always remember hearing everyone breathe and sip and shift their weight with me just thrusting away, feeling like I was fucking on a cloud.

Like I was fucking in front of Jesus and God and all the apostles. Like I was fucking away all my sins and the sins of all mankind. {catches breath} It has been my highest pleasure to share this stage with so many fine men and women over the years. I thank you for taking a moment to listen to what this old boy from the Florida swamps had to say.

A producer’s assistant remembers JXJ’s exodus hen Mr. Johnson found those videos online that caused…well, that was the beginning of the end. I mean we should have…there was no way we were getting around that one. He found those videos and saw he was being labeled as the Father figure type, you know. He was called the Dad’s Friend and Step-Uncle, that sort of stuff. And on set we had kept it ambiguous and he thought…well, he thought he was still in the Brother’s Friend/Step-Cousin type age bracket. And maybe, you know, he could have been if he had taken better care of himself.

We didn’t mislead him per se but we didn’t exactly dissuade him, you know? I mean…I guess we did tell him to act like a 24 year old, so you can see where he got the impression. But I don’t think we ever said act as a 24 year

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old. It was always act like one. And there’s a difference there, you know. But so, I guess we did tell him that he was playing the Brother’s Friend in one video and the Step-Cousin in another but like… we changed our mind in post. That’s not illegal, you know. Sue us.

I mean, he could sue us for breach of contract. Because we had it all in writing but I don’t think he has the money for…I don’t think anyone wants to go through that. This really feels like a let-bygones-be-bygones type situation. {picks nose} Could you redact that last bit, sweetheart? Yeah. Yeah the part about the suing. {examines finger, flicks} But so he walks into the office and there were some nasty words said and there was some roughing up by security but like, well that’s a reap-what-you-sow type thing right? And nobody enjoys…I mean I got a few kicks in too and sometimes after a little exercise, you know… endorphins and everything. So I enjoyed it for a little bit but…I mean like later that night I just felt awful.

A camer aman remembers JXJ’s on-set behavior e were getting ready to shoot, we had the cameras set up and he’s all lubed up and hard and looking like a goddamn newt salamander.

It was spring. We were in the director’s backyard and it was bright as hell. The air smelled like sunburn. Four girls I’d never met were naked and chicken fighting in the pool, making more noise than I cared for them to make.

And the actress is over there smoking a cigarette with the attitude of I’m just here to get paid which the director didn’t mind because she was a damn good actress and as soon as he said Action—which is a figure of speech by the

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way nobody actually says that—she could turn it ON, and watching her you’d think her entire life had been leading up to this moment of fucking John X. Johnson. That every decision she ever made was for this exact drip of time. Like every dollar she got from the tooth fairy, every allowance, every paycheck from ringing up cheap burritos, all of it was to reach this beatific moment where her pussy would meet the cock of John X. Johnson. Her name was Dani, you might talk to her. {nibbles cigar} But anyway, the director is about to start rolling—and nothing actually rolls by the way, it’s all digital—and the guy holding the boom mic, just trying to…I don’t know what he was trying to do, but he said real loud, And on the third day he rose again because it was Easter Sunday. And so John looks confused and asks what day it is and when they tell him he gets real solemn and just stands up and gets dressed in the awful denim suit he always wore—it gave his body all sorts of weird angles and smelled like Vaseline because he wore it with nothing underneath— and he leaves.

You might be thinking he was high, but no. He never shot morphine on set. He was sober as Sampson. I know that for a fact. He would never shoot up on set because it keeps you from coming. We call that poppycock.

We all looked at each other and the PA started making a phone call. The director just cursed and told us to come back tomorrow and I’m eyeing the pool like, maybe I’ll just stick around. And the next morning John was there before everyone, smiling with a big spread of coffee and donuts and we shot the film. {picks tobacco out of teeth} The last I heard of that boom mic holder he was catering bat mitzvahs in Ontario.

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In a moder ately crowded City Hall auditorium, JXJ protested Measure B (The County of Los Angeles Safer Sex In the Adult Film Industry Act) physicist from Cal Tech was on Charlie Rose the other night to discuss this issue in quantum mechanics called The Measurement Problem.

You see, a quantum particle exists in a superposition— it exists in multiple places at the same time—and upon observation, it collapses to a single position. You can think of it like a word. The way that a word sitting by itself can have multiple definitions but in use, in practice, only takes one at a time. This is considered a Problem because of how counterintuitive its conclusion is: that physical reality is not only affected by, but determined by the presence or absence of an observer. {wipes sweat off brow} I don’t think that any of us here have the qualifications to debate what the scientists tell us. But everyone, physicists and politicians and voters and even retired porn actors like myself can all agree that, regardless of whether this problem exists in the sub-microscopic world, it does not exist in our macroscopic reality. To paraphrase Einstein, the moon is there whether we look at it or not.

So why does the City of Los Angeles feel that it can mandate the terms under which people have sex simply because there is a camera present? Why do they feel that they have the right to define our ethics and safety standards, the practicalities and realities of which they don’t understand in the slightest, simply because they can see us? It would be considered an overreach of government authority to dictate the terms in which people have consensual sex within the privacy of their own homes, yet when a camera is present this logic goes out the window.

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{swallows} In the past eight years there has not been a single case of HIV transmission among pornographic actors working in the United States. We undergo stricter testing and safety precautions than any other business. {wipes brow} It is not practical to…to wear condoms and have sex for multiple uh, hours without, you know, injury. Have you thought about what that feels like? What physical side effects that would cause? {clears throat} Our job, what we do, we do it for you. Obviously we love it, and if you reach a certain level then the money’s not bad you know, living wise. But so, ultimately, what really gets us to work, like every day is what this art means to, for, all of you. Just yesterday I got approached outside of my church by a couple who said that my videos saved their marriage. The feeling that it gave me to hear that… {adjusts tie} Think of how much we help you. And consider helping us. Vote down Measure B. {out of breath} Thank you for your time and ears.

A director remembers JXJ’s gambling he first time Johnny was brought out to Vegas for a gig, my cell phone rang so much that I tossed it into the Bellagio fountain.

I had the producer cooking my ass, Johnny’s doctor cooking my ass, Johnny’s priest cooking my ass, and Johnny’s sponsor cooking my ass. And if he had ever gotten married, I would have had his wife cooking my ass too.

All these goddamn motherfuckers cooking my ass.

Trying to shoot a goddamn film.

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Every conversation the crew had was about keeping him under control, keeping him away from the distractions, etc. We didn’t talk once about the film we were there to shoot.

Of course we all turned out to be a bunch of pussies.

Johnny said he was going to the Hard Rock and nobody said a word of protest and after he was gone we all just looked around and called each other dickhole and I went to go find him.

He was sitting down at a blackjack table and I heard him order a Mojito and I wanted to grab the waitress and tell her not to bring it out, but who the fuck was I to her?

A man looking to get security called on his ass, that’s who.

So I just stood there, quiet like a dope. Close enough to smell his aftershave, close enough to lick the mole on his neck and half-wondering what Midwestern state it most resembled.

He won on two queens and then lost a handful. Not seated more than fifteen minutes, he just looked down at his fingernails and got up and left without even taking a sip.

In an old interview, JXJ was asked what he watches always love getting that question. When I first got into the industry, I thought that it was pretty fucking hot to watch the people I knew. But pretty quickly it became like I don’t want to watch this, I just had dinner with her and her family last week.

Or I would remember the day it got filmed and how it was a particularly hard day of shooting because her mom had just died or he had just gotten out of the hospital or whatever. And they still had to show up to work because they’re professionals and all.

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{lights cigarette using butane lighter} I mostly just find amateur videos online. It’s kind of funny that I strive every day to add higher production value and shit, but when I’m on the other side of the screen I can do without the fancy angles and techniques. I want to really feel like I’m watching two people fucking at a moment they chose to share with me. {removes cigarette from mouth without taking a drag} A lot of home videos get sent to my office but I never watch them because I can’t verify anyone’s age. I destroy them right away. {puts cigarette back in mouth} Every day at work I have sex with just the most beautiful women you would ever see, but when I watch porn, the less attractive they are the better. To a degree. I try to find people right at that border, just attractive enough to get me up. {still hasn’t taken a drag} And the Lord’s truth? I think watching people kiss is hotter than watching them fuck, don’t ask me why. I watch a little bit of the fucking, but mostly I keep rewinding back to the foreplay. {removes cigarette} People ask why I still masturbate when I have sex as much as I do. I’m not bragging, it’s my job, and I just look at them all cockeyed. Because to ask me that question means that you don’t get it, you just don’t fucking get it.

The metaphysics of porn are a better reason to watch it than any. It allows you to enter this epiphenomenal state where you are both yourself and the man in the video and somebody in-between. Especially if you watch it in a dark room with the volume completely off. You actually leave your body, I believe that. It’s very meditative. Existence in a superposition. Not so much redefining yourself as undefining selfhood.

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People talk about relating to characters in nonpornographic films, but porn is just a whole different ballgame. I don’t care what famous artistic Russian director you’re watching, he’s not bringing you in like this.

He can’t. {re-lights cigarette} The earliest examples of pornography come from the prehistoric cave paintings. They were drawing huge genitals right next to those famous red deer. Think about what the word prehistoric means. Before recorded history.

Think. Before language. That is the kind of tradition I am operating within. Hunters and pornographers. Old as life. {puts cigarette out} Of course I sometimes jerk off to my own videos.

Wouldn’t you?

A bathroom attendant remembers JXJ’s arithmetic here are two things about him that still stick with me. One is that, when he was chewing gum, he wouldn’t spit it out before he took a shit. He would go into that stall chewing gum and come out chewing gum. Most people spit it out.

The second is what he had to say about mathematics.

Like he would say that one plus one didn’t always equal two. Sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. When I asked how, he said something like if you take one raindrop and add it to another raindrop, do you have two raindrops or one? And he would say that one times one equaled two: When you take one times one, you end up with the one that you get one time, but you also have the one you are multiplying it by. So you have two.

I said, But what if you take one raindrop times another raindrop?

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A producer’s assistant remembers JXJ’s exodus (continued) don’t want to say that it caused, you know, his behavior.

Like I would never say if A then B, so to speak. Like that it was responsible because, you know, we all make our own decisions and I truly believe that. Free will and all. I mean you almost have to.

But things really took a turn after we started putting him in that bunny costume. His skin had just been… it was getting pretty splotchy and he wasn’t, you know, looking like a Hollywood paycheck. And he took a lot of pride in what he did, of course. You don’t get to that level of success without…and so he wanted to try and make it work. For his sake and ours. And he did try…to make it work. But it just…he started drinking again. And he was just sweating like twenty four-seven. The inside of that costume smelled like, well… have you ever left milk out before going on vacation?

And so he got that skin fungus—Athlete’s Body the doctor called it—and then he was really looking bad. And from the drinking and he just started forgetting his lines and we still had to set the scene. Even if you’re a big Easter bunny you still have to hit your marks and all. It’s not…I mean I know it seems like it but it’s not a big joke, you know? We take it very seriously. It still…I mean I don’t want to sound pretentious but, like, it’s still art. It’s still business.

So he was out, you know. Simple as that. And they gave him that Lifetime Achievement Award and he became sort of an ambassador. But he still just looked…I mean it wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t making any of us look good so…you can say it any number of ways, what happened, but we parted ways, we as in the industry and Johnny, and him and his hepatitis and his scarred kidney crawled off to Devil knows where.

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A girlfriend remembers JXJ’s sense of humor was buying Johnny tofu curry out at this place called the Thai Kitchen. It was run by Washoe Indians and pretty low tier but Johnny liked it because they didn’t use fish sauce and he had become vegan. This was after he had moved to the Mojave Desert, after they had made him quit acting and he was eating a can of tomatoes for dinner every night. This big, boulder of a man rolled over and stood a few feet from the table, wheezing and catching his breath. He smelled like rubbing alcohol or ammonia or something. Maybe he was a janitor.

When Johnny looked over, the man smiled and came closer and wanted to shake his hand and I’m coughing like the man was either drinking moonshine or bathing in hydrogen peroxide. But Johnny couldn’t shake hands because his immune system was pretty taxed, so the man patted the table and pulled up a chair and asked if Johnny had any advice about breaking into the industry because yadda-yadda-yadda and Johnny just gave him a tired shake of the head and went back to pushing his rice around the plate.

But the man was still going on and on about how big a fan he was and why doesn’t Johnny make movies anymore and the like. A bat on Mars could see why he wasn’t making movies anymore.

Then the man’s wife or girlfriend or maybe even sister came up while he was counting off his ten favorite money shots. I was like, Don’t mind me, Stranger, and he saw her and said, Of course, I just watch it for the articles.

The whole rest of the day Johnny kept saying, Hey Simone, I just watch it for the articles, or he would take a shirt off the rack while we were killing time before his dialysis appointment, and say, This shirt is perfect. Of course, I only like it for the articles, and start cracking up.

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I didn’t even get the joke. But I would laugh because then Johnny would laugh some more. {pauses} …of course I never once called him Johnny. I always used his real name.

JXJ tells the story of his name hen I was listing some possible names, my first thought was It’s gotta be something that people can type with one hand. Now, I’m not saying mine’s perfect in that regard, but I think I did alright. One of my colleagues used to go by Christian Brock and every time I saw him I’d say, You’re killing yourself with that name, man.

My absolute all-time dream is that when people are watching someone else’s video, right before they come, they realize that it’s me they really want to see. It’s me they want to share that moment with. So they should be able to type my name quickly. As soon as they feel that inward suck, coming is like an explosion, really. A depth charge.

I want them to be able to type in John X. Johnson John X. Johnson John X. Johnson.

Like a chant.

John X. Johnson John X. Johnson John X. Johnson.

Like some Pavlovian spell. I want people to scream my name when they fuck or wake up from wet dreams. This actually happens, you know, people tell me these stories.

Remind me to show you some of the letters. {takes a sip of water} I still audit a few popular websites every week just to make sure that they have clips of my videos that start off in media res. The Finishers. They’re for when someone has been watching a video that they think is fine but has no heartbeat, you know? It’s not sucking the whole room into

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the tip of their cock and they need that depth charge, that final inhalation.

John X. Johnson John X. Johnson John X. Johnson. {voice straining, coughs dryly, gags} I always loved the sound of reduplicated names. Like Woody Woodpecker. I used to lie in bed as a kid and say that name over and over while seeing how close to the ceiling fan I could toss a baseball without hitting it. Still do sometimes. {coughs up phlegm, looks at his hand then wipes it on his pants} It makes it easier to remember, you know? When I was in school—the last day I was ever in school, in fact—we had talked about some poems or stories or something by this guy named William Carlos Williams. Now, I can’t remember a word he wrote and doubt I’ve even read one, but a lot of kids thought his name sounded stupid and were making jokes and here I thought it was the greatest name I had ever heard outside of Woody Woodpecker.

And so me and one of the other boys—Tony or Timmy, something with a Y—ended up getting into a fight after class, you know how school kids are. He walloped me so hard that I had snot dripping from between my teeth. A lot of people were standing around watching and kind of mulling around and such. And I stood myself up—I had no backup, not a friend in the entire school— and I pulled my pants down and they looked at me and down at my dick and laughed because they were too young to understand the gravity of what they were seeing.

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Postcards from the Ottoman Empire

II. CHAOS 2015: Thessaloniki Rowan Johnson

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hat the Greeks want is to get the day going at about noon. They want to sit in one cafĂŠ after another, smoking and drinking Freddo Cappuccino for four hours. To any other style of life the Greeks have only one thing to say: oxi.

To stroll through Aristotelous Square at midnight on a Sunday is to discover how Greek nightlife only truly begins at midnight. A group of baffled foreigners ask for directions to Ladadika and the restaurant owner directs them down the pride of Thessaloniki: Leoforos Nikis. The crowds of young people saunter along, the scooters whine incessantly, but on the side of the marble building the graffiti looms large: Chaos 2015.

Along the Via Egnatia, the wide highway once used by the Apostle Paul on his second missionary journey, there is much more graffiti. This highway was also used by Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Mark Antony, Octavian and Galerius. But now only solitary Greeks shuffle along, crossing themselves dramatically at every church. Now there is only graffiti and deformed beggars and mutilated animals along the road.

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ast night there were celebrations on Leoforos Nikis and the Via Egnatia. The Greeks had voted “no” in the national referendum and it seemed that a real democracy might rise again. For all of the ideas the people voted on, their answers were overwhelmingly clear. Did they want more financial austerity? Oxi. Did they want Germany’s rules and ways of life? Oxi. Did they want to keep the Euro?

Certainly oxi.

At one in the morning, the Palace of Galerius, permanently closed to the public, was deserted but there was more bright graffiti defacing the sign, layers of curses sprayed in all colors. Life was ebbing away for the Greeks. They lost the glory and the essence of what it meant to be alive. They kept drifting, always drifting, and they lost track of everything.

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he old restaurant owner was still too much fire in a world full of water. Stumbling onto the colonnade beneath the Arch of Galerius, he assumed the position of a discus thrower. He spun around and around and released the 2 Euro coin from the outside of his right hand. Blearily he watched as the coin shimmered through the sky and shattered the window of the Eurobank ATM. He walked to the ATM and sprayed his own message of defiance in bright red letters: OXI OXI. And then one more time, just to be clear: OXI. 57

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Birds of Thunder Robert Pope

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got the diagnosis Monday, August 13, 2001—nonHodgkin lymphoma. I would not live out another year.

Though this proved not to be the case, it succeeded, understandably, in disturbing me. Mine was not the first false diagnosis in history and will not be the last. I want to note that Harriet Mardock (1958-2001) was a good doctor whose office was conveniently located in my building.

Though I credit her with a major change in my lifestyle, after that fateful appointment I went back to work, on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center, somewhat depressed, not telling a soul of my diagnosis.

Life had an unreality the next couple of weeks, as if I had already died and could not touch anything. So when the letter from our attorney, Harold Tecopa, arrived Wednesday, September fifth—five days in transit—at my work address, I opened it with little curiosity. It informed me that my grandfather, Archibald Ashton, has been missing for several weeks and is now presumed dead.I put the letter back in the envelope with every intention of telling Mr. Tecopa I would not run out as soon as possible to settle the estate, and whatever else they wanted me to do, and would not be making the journey in the foreseeable future, but I had a double vision. I had a glimpse of what it meant that I would no longer walk the streets of New York City or any of the many streets of this world. I blinked 59

out of existence, came back remembering what I had double seen and double felt: the world without me and my regret that I would not be there anymore. And I saw my grandfather as I had seen him as a child, a teenager, and a college student: an absent-minded, serious, clean-shaven, dusty man in khaki shirt and pants, work boots and black frame glasses—not a hair on his head.Papa Archie’s skull had an odd forehead bulge not unlike the bulge in my own. Though I understand that male pattern baldness derives from the mother’s side, my head is as clean of hair as his then. Once when father left us alone in the house, we bumped into each other in the foyer; he stared and rubbed his head as if looking in a mirror that reflected through time rather than space. I rubbed my head to increase the illusion. He pulled at his nose and warned me not to become so involved in meaningless pursuits that my true work remained undone.

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fter work, I had a drink with Spring Waits and Will Tom, as we called William Thomas, my very closest friends in the office, to let them know I would be gone for a week to settle grandfather’s small estate in the desert. I had mentioned Papa more than once and now I set a photograph of his house on the table as we sipped scotch.

“When were you last there, Ray?” Spring asked.

“Never,” I said. I shrugged at them. “Never in my life.”

“Never?”

I shook my head, surprised to dislodge a tear from my left eye.

“Papa Archie visited from time to time,” I told them.

“Last time, for my Dad’s funeral—eight years ago.”

“I didn’t realize your father had died,” said Will Tom, “the way you speak of him.”

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“We did not always get along.”

“You were closer with your mother,” Will said.

“No, not at all. My mother died when I was young. In the Congo.”

Will wrinkled his brow a bit, and Spring held his drink halfway to his mouth.

“She was engaged in some sort of research there. I don’t know what, I am embarrassed to say. We never lived there.

She flew back and forth and one day her plane went down over the jungle. Last we knew of her.”

“She disappeared?” Spring asked.

It gave me pause, but I nodded. “She disappeared as well.”

“My God, man, don’t you go disappearing on us,” he said, and both of them laughed.

I watched them laugh and then said, “Oh, I won’t.”

“But your father didn’t just disappear, did he? I hope he at least had an honest death.”

“Oh, yes. Cancer. Smoked a pipe, like my grandfather, all his life. Papa Archie insisted we lay him out in his dress white uniform. Said he looked like an angel militant.”

“Well, let’s have another drink then, to the angel militant!” Will said, and so we did, and bid each other farewell on the sidewalk.

I

took Friday off to pack my bags and see my girlfriend Cicely. We had been seeing each other off and on for a couple of months and our relationship had been slowly moving towards serious. I’d decided not to mention my diagnosis until I returned.

Cicely, six years my junior, worked on my floor and usually wore a suit and round glasses that gave her a charmingly severe appearance, even with her hair loose. When she opened the door of her condo, I hardly 61

recognized her: dark hair pulled back in a pony-tail, blue shirt open at the top, soft, faded jeans, bare feet, quite lovely, no glasses and such pale brown-gold eyes.

“Come in,” she said, as I stood gawking. I smelled something delicious. I entered, she shut the door; the rest is a memory I shall never describe in full lest I lose a tiny fraction. Next morning I woke in her sunlit bedroom, happier than I’d ever been. At breakfast, when I suggested I might not fly out west, she insisted I go ahead.

“Family is important, Ray,” she said, licking her fingers.

“Everything will still be here when you return. You can count on it.”

She drove me to the airport and waved as I boarded the plane.

B

ecause my flight to Kansas City was over three hours and my legs a bit long to sit cramped the whole time, I purchased a first class ticket. I felt a bit melancholy when I settled in, so ordered a gin and tonic and read more of the book Will loaned me when he learned of my appointment with Dr. Mardock. It was an old hardback of his sci-fi collection, No Other Man by Alfred Noyes. It pleased me that the scientist in the novel was a Dr. Mardok.

The fellow in the next seat got his ticket as a gift from his parents in K.C. because he’d just finished his PhD in Postmodern Technology. At six-three, he needed that extra space. An appealing young man in a ponytail and beard, he had a freshness I enjoyed. I bought him a drink, another for myself, and listened to his discourse on The Loud Speaker, its place and meaning in our lives, beginning with the megaphone.

“Do you read science fiction, Travis?” I asked him when he seemed to have finished.

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He shook his head. “Not really.”

“This fellow, this Dr. Mardok, invents a death ray that wipes out the human race. How’s that for post-modern technology?”

“Chilling,” he said and sipped the last of his drink.

The alcohol contributed to a desolate mood as I thought of Cicely, far behind me now in New York City. I drifted into uneasy sleep and woke a couple of hours later to climb aboard a big-bellied converted mail transport plane with a large propeller on each wing, wondering if this too was part of a dream.

I watched from the window as stranger parts of this country passed beneath me, our own shadow crossing the fields and waters below. I boarded yet another, smaller plane, nine seats on a side, no moving air. My companions, a family of dark, silent Indians, and a fellow who tipped his cowboy hat over his eyes and went to sleep, did not comfort me on a bumpy ride.

I

no longer knew where I was when I stepped onto the short metal stairway pulled to the door. I waited for other passengers to deplane so I could straighten my clothes, tie my shoes, and lock my carry-on bag. By the time I stepped down onto the narrow runway, I was the only person in sight—unless you count the dark range rover speeding off over the desert in the distance.

It was hot as a brick oven. As I walked toward a small building in the distance, a big dark man on a horse, a rawhide thong around his head, came trotting toward me.

He trailed another without a rider. My eyes watered a bit in fear until he stopped and called, “Archie?”

I shaded my eyes, looking up at him.

He swung his leg over his horse and dropped to the ground with a thud. When he stuck his huge hand out to me, he said, “Howard Tecopa, your grandpa’s attorney.”

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He looked uncertain until I nodded and put out my own hand to be swallowed in his.

“Ray Ashton. Pleased to meet you.”

He took a bandana from his back pocket and wiped his forehead.

“Hot like hell out here, ain’t it?”

“As a matter of fact.”

He took a couple of plastic bottles of water from his saddlebag and handed me one.

“Was the trip too bad?”

“Long.”

We both drank greedily and wiped our mouths while we studied each other.

“You look just like your grandpa,” he said. “A little younger.” Then he looked up at the sun, halfway down in the west. “Well, we don’t want to get caught out in the dark, so we better get along. You climb on Little Bit there.”

With that, he swung back up onto the horse and reached down for my bag. I handed it to him and watched as he attached it to his saddle horn.

“I’m not much of a horseman,” I told him.

“Little Bit there will do all the work.”

After a few failed attempts, I got my leg up over the horse and my butt in the saddle and we trotted along.

Once past the shed we broke into a gallop, and I just hoped I could stay on the horse’s back.

“Just relax and you’ll do fine,” he said. Tecopa had his head turned back to watch me, and when he thought I might make it, he turned around again.

He said nothing the whole way.

I 64

did try to relax, but I felt constant tension through my body until I saw the yellow house approaching in the distance.

When he pulled up beside it, my horse slowed to a stop.

I was so stiff and shaky I fell to my knees when I touched ground. I stayed a moment looking at the house, as if it was a mirage. By the time I stood, Tecopa had gone in the front door with my bag.

Inside, the house was one main room, a living room with a huge desk against a wall and a kitchen area where Tecopa stood, wiping his dripping face on a towel.

“I caught a couple trout this morning. I’ll fry them up if you’re hungry.”

“Starved.”

“I stocked the fridge with beers if you’d like one.”

In a short time I sat at Papa Archie’s table having trout, flatbread, corn-on-the-cob, and a beer with Tecopa.

Everything else, the whole mess of my life, was gone, nowhere to be found. I was nothing but me in this house in the desert. We ate with our heads down. When we finished and had another beer, I felt restored.

“That was good,” I said.

Tecopa smiled and nodded. “Many’s the time I sat here with your grandpa like this.” He held up the beer and nodded. “A fine fella, your grandpa.” He took another long swig, downing the rest of the beer. “You’ll want to step outside now that it’s dark.”

He got up from the table and nodded toward the door.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re going to like this.”

As I followed, I realized it had gotten dark in a short time, and the second thing I noticed was the enormous blue-black sky, splashed and swirling with stars. As I watched I saw a falling star, and in another moment a second. I could feel the quiet all around me.

He said, “Nothing like this in New York?”

“No. Is it always like this here?”

“You bet.”

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We watched the sky several minutes before I heard a distant yipping sound.

“Coyotes,” said Tecopa. “Hunting for anything they can get.”

“Anything?”

“Oh, they’ll most likely leave you alone,” he said, and then he laughed. “Well, I better be getting home to Marg.

She’ll be wondering what happened to me.” He shook my hand, gave me a bright smile, and got on his horse. Before he rode off, he asked if I went to church, and when I told him not really, he whistled and turned the horse.

I could actually see him for quite a while, before he disappeared into a dark inky spot. I heard yipping, more distant now, and above me the dome of the night. Little Bit shifted and startled me. I didn’t know what I should do for the horse, so I went in and turned on as many lights as I could, but that made me feel vulnerable. From outside, anyone could see the house for miles.

I called Cicely to tell her about my trip and hear her laughter, but nothing happened, no tone, nothing.

I turned off the lights, pulled the blanket and sheet off the bed to check for spiders and scorpions, and then took the bedding to the main room and wrapped myself like a mummy on the couch.

It was then that I remembered I was scheduled to die.

W

hen I woke on Sunday, September 9, to daylight, I pulled back the blue curtain to see Little Bit still standing beside the house. I felt guilty for doing nothing for him. I ground beans and made a pot of coffee, and went outside to pee on the ground.

Outside, I stretched and sat a while in the outdoor John.

The air had a touch of coolness. If I had known a thing about riding I might have taken Little Bit out. At just the thought of riding out in the desert, I experienced a terror.

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I poured a mug of coffee and wandered around the main room of the house.

At the other end from the kitchen was a huge fireplace made of large rocks, obviously used regularly. No mantel, nothing on the wall to the stucco ceiling. A couple of rifles stood in the corner, and a row of windows ran the length of the wall against which the couch stood, with short blue curtains on hoops.

On the other side of the room, Papa Archie’s desk, files, cupboard. A rather ugly painting above the desk pictured some prehistoric winged creature, maybe a pterodactyl.

Then I noticed a few more drawings of the same bird stuck to the cupboard.

As I compared them, I became certain that whoever did the painting had not also done the cruder, if more scientific drawings. When I opened the files I came first on one tagged Archie III and found perhaps fifty letters from my own father, so I poured another mug and sat at the table reading these epistles from Dad. We had not had much of a relationship in his last five, maybe even ten years. I suppose then I thought he would live forever and there would be time to get to know him once I’d made him feel my anger for a sufficient length of time. I’d been making my own career as well. I’d like to blame more on him than I do, but reading these letters did not help. Dad spoke glowingly of my accomplishments, and of his hopes for me. Tears obscured the words and I had to lower my head and weep. I kept seeing Daddy in that dress white uniform in the coffin, Papa weeping, calling him Angel Militant.

I sat until I’d read every one from beginning to end, surprised that Dad kept up with Papa’s scientific discussions, interested in whatever discoveries Papa claimed to be making. I noted mentions of the Thunder Bird, but could not tell from the context whether Dad meant a car, 67

an aircraft, or an actual beast. I saw crude sketches of the bird-like creature tacked on Papa’s cupboards in my father’s hand, with suggestions about how the jointures in the wings might work best—as I understood it.

I had been reduced to a child overhearing this conversation between Dad and Grand-Dad. I tried calling Cicely, failed.

W

hen I heard horses’ hooves, I jumped up and ran to the front door, my heart pounding. Tecopa was already coming off his horse, behind him a woman and two children on horseback.

“Howdy,” he called. “I brought my wife and kids to meet you.”

“You are all welcome.”

Once they dismounted, he introduced me to his wife Marg, Richard his oldest, and Betty his daughter. I was relieved that Richard tended to Little Bit when the rest of us went in. As Marg and Howard fixed dinner, he said, “The way you ate that trout last night I thought you might like a little more of the same, made Marg’s special way.”

A short woman with the darkest eyes I have ever seen, Marg wore a white peasant blouse with little red flowers dotting the top, and like all of them blue jeans and boots.

They came from church and she said it was all they could do to make their friends stay home today. “The kids loved your grandpa. They were excited to meet you.”

With a forkful of fish halted before his mouth, Tecopa told me the council met right after church to launch a fullscale search for Papa Archie.

“If they can’t find him, no one will.” In went the fish, but he kept smiling, pointing his fork at me. “I told you, all it would take was for you to come out here.”

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“They need a nudge,” Marg said. “Or they just do what they always do, go on with their lives. That’s how people are.”

R

ichard wanted to show me Archie’s Lizard, as he called it, so later that afternoon, with plenty of water in our saddle bags, we rode out in bright sunlight. Everything looked the same out there to me, but they knew where they were going, up the bare hill a decent distance behind the house, through scrub, yellow flowers, little creatures like dry chipmunks scurrying about, strange birds I had never seen, lizards I saw as an indication of what lay ahead.

“Keep an eye out for rattlers,” Howard warned. We dismounted and left the horses to crawl through a narrow pass and under a cave-like tunnel to a wide, flat section literally cut out of the hill, a rocky abutment. I saw nothing until Richard said, “See his back?” I saw only ruts and cutouts in the hill, and then I saw the backbone Richard pointed out.

“That’s Grandpa Archie’s Lizard,” said Betty. She smiled and hid herself behind Marg, except for her eyes.

“See the head,” Howard said, outlining it from a distance with his finger.

It emerged slowly for me, until the creature lay before me as it had in life and in death.

“Is it a dragon?” I said, and when they laughed I felt foolish and laughed at myself.

Marg clapped her hands in glee. “It was hard to believe you didn’t see it right away, but if you don’t expect it, you might not see it. It jumps right out at us.”

“It chases us in our dreams,” said Richard.

“I call him Squiggly,” said Betty.

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“Archie spent months coming to clear this fellow,” said Howard. “I came sometimes with food and water. He’d forget everything to work. Once I found him passed out and I think he might have died if I hadn’t given him water and carried him back to the house.”

Howard shook his head. “That’s the way it is for a great man,” he said.

“You think he was a great man?” I asked.

They all looked at me. “You didn’t know?” Richard asked.

“I’ve been working in New York all this time.”

Howard told his kids, “Ray here works in the tallest building in the world.”

Already, it seemed so long ago, and so meaningless.

We stood in silence a while before Archie’s Lizard. On the way back we saw a few more fossils and when we got home, more food and drink, a fire outside, and stories of those Birds of Thunder. Howard’s hands swooped gracefully when the birds made an appearance.

N

ext morning, I shooed spiders and watched a lizard cross the ceiling and come down the wall as I sat at Papa’s desk going through his papers. I had a little better idea of what he was doing here, alone in the desert. Time passed without awareness until the ache for Cicely throbbed, recalling our last night, waking in the morning beside her.

I couldn’t even get her a message by email, with no service. Time was short, I told myself. I would leave as soon as my business here was done. I became impatient.

Little Bit was outside, but I didn’t feel confident about riding into the desert. Minutes and hours passed until at three in the afternoon I heard galloping hooves and went out to see if Howard had returned. The group approached 70

at top speed. Tecopa broke from seven dark men, leaping off his horse while the rest waited, circling, pacing. All of them had rifles slung on their saddles.

“We found him.” He pointed off in the distance.

“Alive?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, I climbed on Little Bit. I did not want to upset this difficult day by finding my deceased grandfather.

As we moved down a steep declivity I leaned back in my saddle to offset the angle of the descent. I had no idea such a descent existed out here, or where we would end up. None of the men spoke, though water bottles passed among us and dust rose into our eyes and mouths. I tied a bandana Howard tossed me across my mouth and depended on tears in my eyes to clear them. All the water in my body had been squeezed out by the heat when we leveled, perhaps an hour into the journey.

I noticed more brush down here, fewer creatures scurrying about. A lone coyote watched us pass, and finally we came to an area of huge rocks and rising ground.

“It’s in here,” Howard said. We dismounted and I followed him through boulders while the others waited for us.

“You go on,” Howard said. “Go on ahead. He’s there.”

I picked my way through brambles and scrub, into a cave-like face of rock and earth that had been chipped away, revealing the head of an enormous creature emerging from one side of a rise as if it came at me. I saw the tools scattered about, lying on the ground, and something like a large green-brown pack on the ground right in front of me.

I went to one knee and touched it. My body shook as I realized I had touched a leg. The body had curled into itself, knees raised partway to the chest, arms tucked in, all dried and baked by the sun, only the faintest of dry 71

odors rising off the body. I leaned over him to look into his face, but it wasn’t until I saw the bulge in his forehead I knew it was Papa. I was so far beyond tears I simply sat down beside him and waited for I don’t know what. When I remembered the men waiting for me, I crawled out of the brush and through the crevice, unable to stand as they all watched me coming. When I stood and looked up at Howard, I asked him what we should do with the body.

He shrugged. “Why not leave him here, now that we know where he is. It’s a good spot.”

When Howard looked up, I followed his gaze to the cliff behind us. I stared at it for a while, and then I nodded.

“Sure,” I said. “That sounds right.”

N

ext morning, I hopped on Little Bit and went out by myself. I left a note, in case I got lost. I had strapped on my watch for security and hung Papa’s powerful binoculars around my neck. I did not go down the incline this time but rode to the top of the cliff I had seen from below.

I had a terrible fear of heights at that time, a disadvantage considering where I worked. My soul plunged and rose through my body, out the top of my head as I approached the edge. Astride Little Bit, overlooking a vast desert of which Papa Archie was now a part, my own mortality perched awkwardly on my shoulders, threatening to pitch me forward into eternal doom or exhilaration.

I sat there until the visceral reaction to the height died down and I was at peace. When I dared glance down at my watch, it was eight forty-five. In the distance I saw two birds with an enormous wingspan. If vultures, they were closer than they appeared. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes. I knew at that moment: my life would never be the 72

same. But as usual, we mistake or fail to understand all of the information we are receiving at any moment until much later.

Here, I thought the Death Ray had been aimed at me.

I did not know it was not my future which had ended but my past. I know that mine was not the first false diagnosis in the world, nor will it be the last. But, my dear Dr. Mardock, what strange design has brought me here I cannot name. At times I almost believe that this is nothing more than an incomprehensible afterlife.

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ceremonies

Ceremony Troy Jollimore How exhausting to think of all the beds you won’t sleep in tonight.

As if, having been granted at last the ancient password you had long been promised, you were expected not to fall into love or despair or even a pleasant afternoon’s nap in a citrus grove, but to curl your body around itself and tighten like a semi-colon.

And now, they said, you see what that map on your skin is for, now you see what your hands can do, beyond making a fist or a cross.

And you nodded, not understanding at all, as if nodding would make it clear.

Tomorrow you will be married.

And next month the elders will calculate the distances between the stars, the ones that are visible from the top

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of the granary tower, and get it wrong, as always. Hear me when I whisper, don’t worry.

Your children will sing their songs of grief over your ashes long before it would have made any difference. Dear friend, this universe’s only eyes are yours.

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This Is How You Ask Me to Pray Kelli Allen Now we might understand the crow when she kisses her beak to his, the lover, the sleeper tired of us, but not the expanse above our dusty spaces. How many times have we walked beneath the tree and mistaken the low cries for some weird wind? We know our haunches resist the dirt when we lean back against the old church wall in its yard, a plow and apple cart set as stage pieces to catch the feathers ruffled hard and down from bird tongues too tangled to believe. When you stop us both under the last branch, this October day, we do not join hands, nor fall asleep, no hooves tampering leafy beds, or palms covering knees when the kneel becomes inevitable.

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Physics 101 Tom Montag We know gravity by falling.

We know time by dying.

We know love by longing and loss and a certain emptiness in the morning and then again late at night, and when we turn and touch, something rising in both of us.

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The Strange Lullaby of Dr. Lennart Nilsson Heather Altfeld Like any good bubbie, he wakes you up in the night to offer instructions for growing a baby.

He tells you that if a boy breathes into your belly button it can spring an egg that will pop and bloom and loop around inside you like silly string for nine months or until you are a teenager.

How will you ever find a boy who will get on his knees and blow into the button of your navel?

Half as likely as dragons in the sewers or trunks of coins buried beneath the linden trees.

The Swede does not leave your bunk until you promise to consider your womb.

All night you imagine it there, swimming in light, full of happy goldfish.

The next morning a morsel of limpa bread and some lingonberry jam on the table, but no note and no praise for how hard you tried to think about it. No advance on the years to come, all that mascara and eyeliner gone to waste. Still, the next day and the next you buy a fleet of halter tops and dolphin shorts,

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and wear them until someone with a wispy goatee hears the end of your yelling little cord and picks up the line. The first time he blows your hair away from your ear, you know what happens. Fast as Mouse Trap!

Now she spins inside you, inky as a frog and twice as wise. From the beginning, she loves the improbable; giraffes, Neil Young, lions sick in bed, tear-water tea.

She blows on boys like dandelions.

They scatter at her visage. She falls asleep at night with the velocity of a deep sea clam.

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Sacrifice Liesl Nunns

I

t is the September of 1999 and the last century’s dead are now breaking out in swathes of daffodils. Pales and brights nod against the path which is only just chewing up its autumn layers, much as my 14-year-old self is now chewing up its baby soft. Casey flips a button up off her thumb and catches it in her other hand, back and forth, as we wend down from sun to shadows. Buttons are her new thing. She had split open Danny Brothers’ chin with a well-aimed flick of a button during Friday’s third period Social Studies class, and the shocked glare he threw her was one of open anger and lust. She was like a cattlerustler among a voluble herd of man-boys. The mean in her was catnip to them, and it made me sad for both her and them. But it made her feel strong. She bounces a button over a headstone and it skims off into the long, wet grass.

Dunedin’s Northern Cemetery trails down from the crest of the hill, down towards the nested valley where my high school is. Ancient for this new land and now out of use, it twists down under the tall trees, sunken and ceremonial. Even the angels and crosses are now slowly crumbling back down toward the terraced plots. The cemetery is a quiet shadow to the Botanical Gardens that blanket the hill in the other direction. There, everything strains lightwards with effusive new green. Perennials and succulents and herbaceous everythings tumble along from 83

the Australian borders to the Mediterranean garden to the rhododendron dell, carving out gentle lawns for the picnics and cricket matches of the living. On the top of the hill, between the cemetery and the Gardens, the Alhambra athletics ground holds apart such abundance and decline with its steady stretch of flat space.

We walk through the cemetery every day, Casey and I, to and from school. It is the most direct route from this hill suburb down into that valley where our day waits in right-angled breeze block buildings. Graves do not make me squeamish, now that I begin my day with them. The Northern Cemetery is a pleasant place to me. A sanctuary.

The official entrance is at the Sexton’s Cottage, where once the caretaker had warmed his boots, but I must admit that we just slip in through the hedge and over the graves themselves. We walk on a lot of the graves, the same ones all the time, for navigational reasons, the ones edged only by shallow concrete trim, not cordoned off behind mottledorange ironwork railings with their curlicued pikes. There is a road that curves through the cemetery whose course never touches ours. We traipse straight over the graves and down to the path littered now with blossom petal snow, the ones whose headstones never feel a passing touch and whose earth has not been trampled flat by teenaged feet.

They are collapsing in on themselves, the earth breaking open like bread.

‘Jim and Mary are busy this weekend,’ Casey says over the button that is sidling in her mouth. ‘We’re going out to Long Beach for a bonfire, if you want to come. Jason Sutcliffe and all them.’

She always calls them Jim and Mary, to remind them that she has no intention of respecting them simply because they are her parents. Jim and Mary are often busy, often unaware of what their children are doing. They are caught 84

up in Celtic arts shows, and Highland festivals, and the Caledonian society. They are simple, boring, nice-enough people who have buried themselves in their heritage. Not even their heritage specifically, for Mary confessed to me that both she and her husband trace their New Zealand family lines merely to England. But it is theirs. For Scotland clings like a film to this deeply southern city of Dunedin, laid over these hills and valleys with Edinburgh street names and Presbyterian institutions. Robert Burns presides over the city’s centre, bronze scroll at his bronze feet, and living seagull usually on his bronze head. The place is lousy with highland dancing, haggis ceremonies, and kilts. The Scots who founded our churches, our schools, our brewery, now sleep under my school shoes but live in Jim and Mary’s hearts.

I mumble my excuse for the weekend. We was Casey and her older brother Aaron, who looked like a white supremacist, skinny and cruel. And Jason Sutcliffe and ‘all them’ were Aaron’s creepy friends. They liked to burn things, to drink pre-mixed bourbon from cans, to drive around in their lowered cars with their mates or their girlfriends or their dogs lounging in the backseat.

They’d build great big bonfires on the beach, and throw on broken bits of stolen furniture and old cardboard boxes and splashes of petrol. Casey had told me about how she would write one of her poems and throw the pages in to the flames. Like a sacrifice, she said, with a strange smile.

And it was the way she said it. The way I imagined Jason hearing her say that.

‘You’re such a snob.’ Casey grins, cold-eyed.

‘I am not…?’

‘Well, then, you’re a chicken. You know, most fourth formers don’t get to hang out with seventh form guys on a Saturday night. Do you want to be a baby all your life?’

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I dodge a button. ‘I already told Kathryn that I’d go to her birthday sleepover on Saturday night, okay? Don’t make such a big deal out of it.’

Casey clasps her hands together in mock rapture, ‘A doll made of satin and gold, for me? Oh Mummy, it’s the best birthday ever. Let’s celebrate with another round of fizzy drinks!’

I laugh. But Kathryn isn’t like that. Well, she is a little bit like that. She’d gone to St. Hilda’s Collegiate when I’d gone to Logan Park High School, but we’d stayed friends.

I would stay at her house on a Friday night sometimes, and her Mum would drive us to Kathryn’s Youth Group in their SUV, and make pancakes in the morning. Kathryn would learn the dance moves from pop music videos, and she’d buy Girlfriend magazines and do the quiz to find out whether she was on his love radar. She’d get openly excited about doing well at the science fair and she’d paste pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince William on her maths book. She’d thank her father when he dropped us off at the movie theatre, and all manner of other things that Casey would baulk at. Kathryn’s life was a steady stream of warm light. Or, at least, that’s sure how it seemed when you spent one evening a month in its embrace. She is a little dull, but I never have to worry about being labelled uncool, or a snob, or a baby around her.

On the continuum of child to adult, Casey is frantically pulling in one direction, while Kathryn still luxuriates at the other end. Casey’s headlong vault along the spectrum pulls my curiosity along with it, electricity hissing in my mind. But then there is Kathryn, and I can take a breath.

With her, I can be easy.

‘Anyway, do what you like.’ Casey throws the issue off, along with her backpack, and sits down on a grave. It is the plain kind that is concreted over in a simple slab, just one 86

crack running its length, tufted with grass. It catches the morning light between the trees, and one of Casey’s new things is to stop there for a smoke before we get too near the track down to school.

And so my new thing is to pretend to be determined to climb all the way up the tree opposite, purely as a way to avoid my uniform smelling of smoke. A voice inside me tells me I am a weakling because I cannot stand up to her, but it has become a habit not to really hear that voice.

I clamber up to a branch out of the upward path of grey stink. Down the hill, I can just make out the blue spill of harbour beneath a colourless, high-flung sky. And back up the hill, the late-Victorian spire of Larnach’s tomb outdoes the treetops. It mimics in miniature Dunedin’s First Church, and houses the eternal rest of William Larnach, his wives one and two, and his children. It is common lore that a university student snuck in once and stole Larnach’s skull and then kept it on his desk, a cigar propped in the gaping bullet hole. The Jason Sutcliffes of previous generations had desecrated the tomb with drunken parties and amateurish cult rituals and the casual insult of graffiti. Larnach’s tomb had paid the price of standing out, with its size and its grandeur, among the higgledy-piggledy tessellation of its neighbours. It was also a victim of the notoriety of its owner, Larnach: banker, politician, bankrupt, and suicide. He built what is now the city’s most popular attraction, Larnach Castle. He was father to the city’s most famous ghost, daughter Kate who haunts the Castle ballroom built for her 21st birthday, where tourists now take their scones. It is the only grave that makes me think of dead people.

Then I think of Kathryn, on her way to school in the SUV, with her birthday phone tucked in her zip pocket. It can even send text messages, apparently.

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‘Right, c’mon.’ Casey stubs out her cigarette and leaves it where it falls. She picks up her backpack, which is as thick with graffiti as Larnach’s tomb. Her wilful sabotage of anything too pretty is a good defence against any charge that she might actually care about them, let alone covet them. I’d heard her tell people outright lies: that Jim and Mary were divorced, that Jim now lived in a caravan out in Mosgiel and had to deal pot for a living, that Aaron was a pimp. She constantly holds her arms open towards poverty and difficulty, so that nobody could ever think they could shame her in any way, or maybe because she thinks that her regular middle-class existence is the greatest embarrassment of all. The thing about poverty and difficulty that worries me on her behalf, however, is that they offer a notoriously high acceptance rate to all candidates. But there ain’t no fucken poetry in money, she says.

And she does write beautiful poetry. It is a shame she should ever burn them, for they contain all the clever humour and unaffected strength secreted within Casey. I had seen them, seen her, just not in a while.

T

he summer ripped up hot for Dunedin that December and, in the last days of the school year, the afternoons in the cemetery offer pockets of deep cool. Casey walks barefoot home from school, hopping over stones on the path. We lie in the long grass at the top of the hill where tall trees border the athletics club. A friendship bracelet clings to Casey’s bony ankle as she props her long legs up against the last phalanx of headstones. She is in her gym shorts, with her school kilt stuffed behind her head. She has been quiet all week. Jason Sutcliffe is leaving, now that he’s finishing his seventh 88

form year. Apparently he is going up north to Te Puke, to work on his uncle’s kiwifruit orchard.

Casey was angry when she found out, last weekend.

We had been sitting out on her deck, making up a betting game from a rubber-banded stack of Baha cards we’d found in the living room. We had no idea of the original rules.

Casey had made herself a nutmeg milkshake, because her cousin had told her that they get you high. When she went to get her old button stash to use as currency, I stole a sip.

It just tasted of milk and nutmeg, and she ultimately left it largely ignored. Then Aaron came up the driveway with a mouth full of swear words and clenched fists full of bitten nails. He took the steps up to the deck two at a time, anxious to offload at somebody his disgust at Jason’s news.

Disappointment and dismay had made Casey small at first, hunched inwards for just a moment. But then she had puffed herself up with indignation to meet Aaron’s eyes. ‘Why doesn’t he just get a job in an orchard down here, in Roxburgh or somewhere, so he can still see his friends? Who wants to live in Te Puke?’

I haven’t ever been to Te Puke, so I had shrugged my shoulders.

Aaron waved his finger at her, indicating he was yet to reveal the worst bit of the whole thing. ‘And his uncle’s a fucken Māori. Jason doesn’t even speak fucken Māori.

Nobody does. Who’d want to?’

That statement had left a sickness in my stomach. I knew, as he was saying it, that I would never stop feeling guilty for having heard those false and offensive words, and for having sat silently at their utterance with the Baha cards in my hand like a hymn book.

But now Casey is reflective and still, and the idyllic day is lulling me back into easy, lazy companionship. From the 89

athletics club the sounds of children bounding through high jump and long jump bubble up behind us, and tennis racquets reverberate like champagne pops. I imagine a perfect version of my future self in a tennis dress, shoulders glistening with sweat under the last of the evening sun, playing the sort of match that is competitive yet peppered with laughter. Back home, a husband in a polo shirt is preparing a barbecue on our deck. Classical music plays on a stereo, and there is a little dog with a spotty neckerchief.

My perfect version of my future self is my greatest secret from Casey. Every night, when I lie in bed, I run scenarios through in my mind, speaking various conversations for her, deciding various actions and responses for her, from the mundane to the major. Each night I pick up where the last night had cut off with the onset of sleep. She is nice to visit, safe to greet and then farewell.

‘Do you want to start running this summer?’ Casey asks, out of the blue.

I am thrilled not to have to think of an excuse, and relieved that she wants to do something positive and healthy and naff. ‘That would be really cool.’

‘We could meet every second morning, or something.’

‘Yeah, let’s do it.’

I wonder if my friend is coming back to me, poking an honest head above her recent disguises. But then she rolls onto her side to look at me, and starts plucking out blades of long grass aggressively, like a dare.

‘I need to get in shape.’

Casey has the effortless physique of an athlete.

‘Yep,’ she continues. ‘That’s the plan. Mr Mason told me to try out for the senior basketball team next year.’

‘That’s great. Well done.’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Senior boys, get it? The senior girls’ team is tight with theirs, apparently. I reckon I can get 90

Brendon Wilson to notice me, even if I will only be a fifth former.’

Brendon Wilson is roundly lauded for being a bit of a slut.

‘You know…’ She tucks her legs under her, leaning forward intently, ‘Jason says he’ll sacrifice me before he goes up north.’

‘He’ll what?’

She grins a fiery grin. ‘How have you not heard about this? It’s his thing, sacrificing virgins.’

I stare at her, and my heart picks up its rhythm with a little jump. This is the sort of conversation that I never have to have with Kathryn, the sort of conversation my future self never has with her tennis partner.

‘It’s some devil worship thing or something.’ She shrugs nonchalantly and switches her hair from over one shoulder to the other, swearing lightly as she catches her hand on a tangle of prickles.

‘Casey.’

‘What the crap is with all these prickles everywhere all of a sudden? Are you getting—’ ‘Casey!’

Her attention flicks back to me, and now she looks annoyed, jutting out her chin in exasperation. ‘What?’

‘You’re going to let Jason sacrifice you?’

‘So what? Like you care.’

For a second, I think maybe I don’t care and that I shouldn’t have to suffer her ridicule for trying to look out for her, but then I imagine Jason looming over her, cackling darkly, maybe holding a knife.

‘It’s a stupid idea. He’s too old, and he’s…he’s just gross.’

She bites her lip, and we look at each other. I want to put my hand on her shoulder, but I just sit there helplessly.

It would be easier if we weren’t friends, and then I wouldn’t 91

have to keep pretending not to prefer reading books in my pyjamas on a Friday night. I wouldn’t have to think of reasons to avoid being alone with Aaron at her house, when she went to the bathroom or into the kitchen. I wouldn’t have to feel weak every time I chose childhood over adulthood for that little bit longer.

She gets up and leaves, carrying her shoes by their laces.

I

n late January, I begin the fifth form. I walk to school with Lara Hincapie and her twin brother Bevan. They have only just moved to Dunedin. Their mother now works with mine, and a work family barbecue had brought us together at a time of similar social need. I like them a lot. We walk through the Botanical Gardens and around the base of the hill to school. It takes longer, but we stop at the bakery for banana milk and $2 bags of yesterday’s croissants that Bevan sells to his new mates at $1 a pop.

Casey isn’t in any of my classes. I have not spoken to her all summer, not been for any of those runs, and it has not been awful by any means. None of my friends have seen her all summer. And then on the first day back, I spot her and her new crowd of basketball girls all lounging behind the gym. It gives me the same sick feeling I get when Bevan walks home hand-in-hand with Emily McEwen. Maybe it is my imagination, but Casey looks three years older than I feel now.

February is wetter than usual. After school, Lara and I lie around in the bandstand in the Gardens, listening to the rain on the roof, talking about Drama class and the Geography field trip.

‘Have you heard anything about Casey and Jason Sutcliffe?’ I ask her, anxious not to betray too much concern in my voice. Lara has barely met Casey, but thinks she is just a bully, and an attention-seeker. But Lara does P.E., 92

which I don’t do, and she hears gossip in the changing rooms that I don’t hear.

‘No.’ Lara shrugs. ‘But I heard about a Jason Sutcliffe and Jemma Hartney. What do girls see in him? He sounds like a creep.’

‘Dunno.’ I really didn’t.

And then, on a Saturday evening, I get off a bus in town with Lara and Bevan and Kathryn. We are going for coffee at Governor’s. Emily isn’t around anymore and, in my shoulder bag, I have Bevan’s 1970s paperback, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered.

I have only read the introduction so far, breathless with 15-year-old hope. I sleep with it under my pillow, and my future self has become, in turns, a founder of an NGO and a (very attractive) lecturer in Sustainability Studies, and has played a lot of tennis with an adult version of Bevan who looks into her eyes and laughs and says, ‘After all this time, can you believe we’ve found each other?’ And then he realises that she was there all along, and then—and then the real Bevan swears softly, and we all stop and look in the direction where he now runs.

It’s Aaron and his mates. They have a guy pinned against a wall in an alleyway. He looks like he is Malaysian, maybe Indonesian, perhaps a university student. He looks freaked out. Aaron is hanging back slightly, but the others are all crowding their prisoner. His arm is twisted up behind him, and he’s copping a faceful of brick wall. One of Aaron’s friends spits in the guy’s face while another rifles through his backpack, pocketing a wallet and a phone.

Bevan takes off before we can stop him, and throws himself in to the middle of them. He has surprise on his side, and they lose their grip on their prey as they turn to see what is happening. Bevan pushes the Malaysian student out of their reach just as one of Aaron’s friend lands a punch square on Bevan’s jaw.

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I am running now. We all are. Running to help, as the group of Aaron’s mates close in around Bevan, grabbing his neck and punching his face. Aaron is still hanging back, unsure. But then he sees me, and our eyes meet, and everything about him becomes cold and hard. He launches himself again Bevan, kicking like an animal, and Bevan goes down heavily against the footpath.

Even this scum won’t hit a bunch of teenaged girls, and they hesitate when Lara claws her way in to Bevan. They run away and, maybe I imagine it, but they start hooting with laughter.

‘Is Bevan ok?’ I ask Lara. She is crying, but says she thinks so. A crowd has come out from the shops or stopped in passing, and now there are adults who are in charge of this situation who say things like ‘police’ and ‘ambulance’ to Lara. I can’t see Bevan, but I hear him mumbling a reassuring sound.

I go to pick up the backpack and return it to its owner but he’s gone, and the bag with him. I wonder who he was. In my mind, I tell him that I’m ashamed that this happened here. I want to go storm up Aaron and Casey’s driveway, a mouth full of swear words and hands full of fists. I don’t want to sit around silently again. But then Bevan is getting up, helped by the paramedics, and he makes a joke at his own expense. He laughs a wincing laugh. I feel Kathryn’s hand in mine. We are there, and I feel strong.

I

n March, the trees begin to close the cemetery over with gold again. I haven’t been there all year, but Mr Deane announces that our History class, and Mrs Guthrie’s, are taking third period to go up into the cemetery to see a new memorial consecrated. For some mutton-chopped grandfather of industry, I presume.

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The graves are still there, holding out their concrete and earth palms to me. And now, in a hollow of grass, there is the new memorial, a smoothed rock, like a fallen comet, like an artefact from the future or the heroic past. Broad curves of flared nostrils and a thin sweep of closed eyes show a face of quiet agony upturned to this amphitheatre of dead Scots and of English trees. A curling moko crowns his chin below a gentle topography of tattoo lines, like a thumbprint declaring him in this alien place. He was terrifying and beautiful and humble.

Then there was Casey beside me, breaking away from the others in Mrs Guthrie’s class. I feel lightheaded, keenly aware of her standing there, saying nothing. Aaron hangs between us like a sack of rocks, but I feel a peace offering brewing inside of her as she fidgets from one foot to another. Hope ties a balloon in my stomach.

‘I didn’t let Jason do it, you know,’ she says suddenly, in a tone that implies she thinks I’ll be pleased. ‘We didn’t… you know.’

That’s not the point all. I don’t say anything. I just watch the assembling official party. Solemn Māori men in cloaks, awkward city councillors, and a photographer from the Otago Daily Times always hunching in somebody’s way.

‘Jemma did it though. She said it was really lame. Not a sacrifice at all. Not like anything actually cool.’

The kaumātua, the elder, begins to speak. He weaves words of his ancestors. “He kāwai rangatira i puta mai i a maunga Taranaki…They grew under the protective mantle of the mountain Taranaki. They were firmly connected to their roots, their tūrangawaewae. Then arrived the colonial wars that uprooted their lives, and resulted in their captivity. They were brought as prisoners to the deep 95

south, to the colder climes, to this strange land. They were separated from their family, their whānau. They were put to work building roads. Sickness and death befell them. One by one many died, and they were buried in the Northern and Southern cemeteries. Buried in unmarked paupers’ graves. Lonely graves in the midst of those who were their captors and also those who enjoyed the rights and dignity of free people. We will not forget them, the suffering and their loss can only be imagined. Their sacrifice will be remembered.’1 Tears are in my eyes. I feel that, with me, the trees and Larnach and the stone angels are all stirring, shaking themselves off. We feel each other out, with shame and redemption, loss and unity. Together we warm trembling hands against the tendrils of the moko.

‘I mean, it’s ridiculous,’ Casey whispers, leaning in close to me, indignant. ‘There wasn’t even a ceremony.’

I nod sadly, thinking of the unmarked graves containing their forgotten lumps of stolen life. We’d been walking by them, over them, all this time. They knew us, but we didn’t know them. I turn to tell her that she should write a poem about this.

But then I really hear her. I see her disinterested face.

I understand what Casey is actually saying. I walk away.

1. Adapted from the original words spoken by Tom Ngatai, March 2000, as translated by Edward Ellison.

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You Are Sitting at the Table Tim Robbins preamble I keep thinking about the groom’s side and the bride’s and how at the reception, amid bad dancing to corny music, in boozy informality (antidote to ceremony) this segregation gets flushed.

The couple drives off to recuperate.

The newly connected families droop at the first of many messy tables, beginning the long interweaving of chronicles. amble North from the Cumberland Gap, from the Ohio to the Big Blue River, Chrysler attracts and a girl remembers a school where spellings, hardy as wildflowers, solid as big, lovely as blue, entered her world.

She remembers her father’s lap.

The watch twirling, cajoling memories of unforeseeable, punishing slaps.

Fleeing her village, your grandmother is a fulcrum; the long pole stretches before and behind her, Older Sister in the pioneering basket — Younger Sister, lagging, balancing.

Car-less, his wife in labor, Dad sprints to the parsonage.

The parson fills the doorway, 97

impatient as a comic to relay a new joke.

With Deborah’s wisdom a kitchen voice bellows, “Arnold, get them kids to the hospital!”

Enfants terribles. Two Vietnamese children run naked in the street.

I never see the girl. I never see the boy.

She’s a photo in a thousand papers, on a thousand websites, flapping featherless wings, rushing toward us with the black cloud, the clothed, the uniformed.

He’s a figment I conjure from childhood tales you tell me of a street purged by the morning’s dose of monsoon and unwary passersby harmlessly doused from a hose wielded under cover of your family’s outdoor shower.

Eight thousand miles away my brother and I wiggle through a sprinkler’s cold falling arches.

Barefoot, we dodge clover bees.

At the bathroom tap we feel balloons grow heavy like bloated bellies.

Not to cleanse your feet, but to make them deportable, your father leads you to the mosque.

It will take more than this to induce the Party to brush your dust from its feet.

Seven years old in a camp in Thailand you hold it in for weeks on end, terrified of falling into foreign toilets.

You’re constipated to this day.

In the attic of your aunt’s house in New Orleans you and your sisters warm your hands on sewing machines, 98

piecework far past midnight.

When staying up late is still thrillingly forbidden, Dad comes to the foot of the stairs and calls up softly, “Grandma, are the boys in bed?”

“Shush, you’ll wake them,” as we squeeze in tighter, one on each side of her in that wide green chair, eyelids struggling with TV’s relentless, beckoning flicker. postamble A poet and a mathematician set up house midway across the Bridge of Birds.

You bring your numbers. I bring my words.

We both bring scraps of tales to burn in a barrel at our forebears’ feet.

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Work that Hurts Andy Smart My father paid his union dues like other men put crisp twenties in the collection plates of churches. My father loved my mother like Orpheus loved Eurydice—which is to say he was stupid for her. The song he played was a solo he kept to himself most nights. After he strummed the heavy equipment that kept the post office running—outdated sack sorters, tray lines with precarious ground wires, all the indelicate mailboxes cherry-bombed by teenagers or mowed down by drunken pickup truck pilots—my father came home and did not kiss my mother. He removed his black boots with rheumatic knuckles like toggle bolts holding his hands together and then unbuttoned the oil-stained work shirt that wore his dandruff on its collar. With his big belly exposed, he eased himself down onto the hardwood floor and called for our old black dog to come.

It was always the same father, the same ritual, though we put the black dog to sleep one morning after Christmas when I was ten. We got another, like my father took a mistress. He petted the new dog, stroked its hair and kissed its head. He said nothing to my mother or to me. He was a machine himself, of loving grace. He watched us open presents he bought. Eat food he put on the table. Amble into the clothes he put on our backs.

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My father was work. And when I asked him, as I did on my bolder nights when the wanting for his love was as immense as his presence in the hallway, How was your day? his reply was a mumble of fact: This broke.

I fixed them.

He patched the holes in his relationships with money he didn’t have. He paid his union dues but not the light bill or my mother’s health insurance. He took second and third mortgages and borrowed against his car that ran slower than I could jog when I still smoked cigarettes.

My mother and I knew nothing of what was broken or breaking all around us. And when my father, on the hottest day of the year and the day before Father’s Day, put his pistol in his mouth and sprayed his secrets and his debts onto the side of our garage, we didn’t see how anything had been or could ever be fixed.

My father’s voice that said so little caroms off of clouds some nights. It says little words like Son. Tired. Work.

Sleep.

My father says nothing, now, of how he occupies himself. This is how I have come to understand what we will be for one another, always.

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Postcards from the Ottoman Empire

III. KIPO BEACH: Samothrace Rowan Johnson

A

fter watching every last traveller leave the ferry, the man with the long hair realizes the group of Turkish tourists who booked out his hotel won’t be coming and the two goats he prepared to be roasted over a fire will be ruined in the hot weather.

He shaves the sides of his head and leaves the rest of his hair long so that it looks like a lion’s mane. He steals a scooter and speeds out of Kamariotissa, passing the Sanctuary of the Great Gods and the Fonias River, passing Therma and the vathres of the small island.

On the long steep descent to Kipo Beach, the sun burns a hazy pattern over the Aegean Sea as he takes the bike up to maximum speed and extends his arms up behind him like a deranged Winged Victory of Samothrace. Where the road fades off into rocks and sand, a small goat lays tranquilly at the bottom of the hill. The man aims the scooter directly at it, crashing into the animal. The scooter flips over and clatters across the beach, finally coming to rest deep under the waves.

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The man lies cut and bruised on the grey pebbles and stony sand. Panting like a wild beast, he lifts his bloody hands and retrieves the goat’s carcass and then limps into the ocean. Stripping off his clothes and letting them float away, he washes himself and the dead animal in the salty water. When stumbling back to shore, he finds a long piece of driftwood and spears it through the goat. He gathers some wood and starts a fire, placing the goat on the spit.

Slowly, slowly, as the sun sets, and the flames sear the meat, the man sits naked on the rocks and tears away at the goat’s carcass, staring across the sea at Turkey.

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The Grandmaster of Gaza Tom Vowler

H

e watches her contemplate the hole she’s dug for herself, her impetuosity the prelude to another losing position. Morning sun falls on the ebony and boxwood pieces, a set carved in this room by her grandfather, his father, during the first intifada. It is flawless except for the black king’s absent finial, lost to a falling section of wall when a tank shell struck the house across the street. He should repair it, find a wood that matches, though he is no artisan, lacking his father’s élan for such matters. For now the piece’s imperfection acts as a harbinger of white’s early advantage, something his daughter is often profligate with.

Yasmeen retreats the bishop, huffs at the realisation her attack was ill-conceived.

You have to anticipate all the outcomes, he says. Don’t be so impatient.

She pretends it is of little consequence, that another opening will present itself, optimism inherited from her mother. With practice she could be very good, perhaps as strong as her grandfather, who regularly beat the grandmasters of Europe and America in epic correspondence games. At the height of his prowess, there 105

were invitations to tournaments and exhibitions around the world, but even when permission was granted for him to travel, he chose to stay, lauding his beloved city, the sea breeze that billowed in at night, the fresh tuna fishermen barbecued on the beach.

Why would I leave? he’d say.

They called his father the Grandmaster of Gaza, though he achieved no such rank officially, his status more one of quiet legend. It was said that by the age of six he could beat everyone at his school, and, a few years later, everyone this side of Tal al-Hawa. As worthy opponents became harder to find, he was enticed to the West Bank, to play in the cafÊs and marketplaces of Ramallah and Jenin, where wizened men four times his age and twice his size would marvel at the bravura of his gambits, the apparent recklessness of his sacrifices. He had no formal instruction, the game learned by watching others play at family gatherings, the house on Sundays a place of great theatre and revelry. When a game between uncles ended in a draw, he would often announce how one of them could have triumphed if only they’d persevered, demonstrating the sequence of moves to a mesmerised audience. Aged twelve he was invited to play a visiting Hungarian master, a series of games witnessed by half of Palestine, the legend went. Two defeats and a draw later, the man returned to Budapest broken and, it was said, never to play again.

Y

asmeen is bored now, the days without school long and empty. It is one thing to have an irritable teenager skulk about the house during evenings and weekends, quite another from dawn to dusk. He will send her to buy bird food later. They have been told the classrooms are too badly damaged to open for the new 106

term, and so, in between their games of chess, he gives her lessons at the kitchen table, indulging his daughter’s appetite for knowledge. When the power is on – six hours a day, if they are lucky – he uses the computer given to them by a fan of his father’s, watching British wildlife documentaries, a little of which he understands. Or he encourages her to write an essay on one of the novels she read last term, sometimes a story of her own. Science is her passion, but he knows little of how it’s taught, and in moments of levity Yasmeen laughs at his clumsy attempts to do so. He hopes she will become a doctor, though talk of such is rare these days; it is hard to look too far ahead while death walks so brazenly among them. She will be offered counselling when the school finally reopens, as all children are, to deal with the trauma of the last fifty days, to come to terms with it. She will refuse.

He savours the last of his morning coffee. Warm air brings on it the sound of falafel crackling in the fryer run by the old man at the end of the street. It is a strange time, once the euphoria of a ceasefire recedes, the realisation it will take years, a decade perhaps, just to see the city returned to how it was in June. What has changed for the better, people ask, for surely this cannot have been for nothing. It will be different this time, goes the old lie.

Rubbish collections stopped more than a month ago and have yet to resume, scores of feral cats and dogs amassing at the piles of detritus. Redolent of some medieval tableau, donkey carts have been deployed to collect what they can. Two weeks ago the pumping stations, bereft of fuel, stopped working and raw sewage now seeps into the streets, the sludge drawing throngs of flies. They say it will find a way into the water supply soon.

Gazans adapt, though; he sees it everywhere. One of their neighbours runs a car on spent cooking oil, the waft 107

of falafel and fries lingering in its wake. Others cram four at a time in the front seat of a taxi to get to work, the scene faintly comic. During the last war, when a shell killed the zoo’s only zebra, the owner’s son bought a white donkey, secured tape down its flanks and painted the gaps with black hair dye, the result a small zebra that brays. You make the best of things. *

I

t was the Russians his father truly admired, though it was unclear whether he saw any of the greats play, his veneration of them likely coming from games he studied. Their influence even contributed to his most enduring affectation when playing, a subtle yet damning flourish that saw him grind a piece into the board after advancing it, unsettling the most stoic of opponents. As a child he would watch his father play out endless positions alone, studying alternative paths a game could have taken, scrutinising the pieces for hours as if they held the code to life. Notation to every game was documented with deliberate strokes of a fountain pen in his leather-bound journal, its pages handmade from the finest Italian paper, the cover held together by a burnished copper clasp. He would listen to coverage of high profile matches unfolding on the other side of the world, playing out the game himself as moves stole through on an old valve radio, the air rich with the odour of hot dust.

It was a surprise to everyone when his father stopped playing, the set stowed away instead of adorning the alcove mid-game. Only when Yasmeen returned from school one day and requested he show her how to play, were the pieces retrieved.

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H

e prepares their lunch, leaving Yasmeen eyeing his weakened king-side pawns. Food is more plentiful since the ceasefire – olives, dates and bread abundant again. He salivates at the thought of za’atar spice for breakfast in the coming days, of fresh sardines barely an hour from the ocean. There is a rumour it will be safe to fish again soon. Later he will head out to the lemon grove his own grandfather planted in the fifties, check this modest source of income has not been destroyed. It amazes him how fruitful these citrus trees are, how hardy they have become, despite the parched soil. Much of their best arable land falls inside the buffer zone, where they are forbidden to farm.

Work is harder to come by since the Egyptians flooded the tunnels at Rafah. He is not sorry, his body too beleaguered to be hauling livestock and fuel underground for half a mile in appalling conditions. It is a younger man’s work. They say it is the biggest smuggling operation in the world, employing tens of thousands, a lifeline of their economy but also a death trap. Tunnel walls collapse, cables snap, fires break out. A cousin once tried to smuggle in a lion for the zoo. The animal, insufficiently sedated, awoke mid-tunnel, opening him up from neck to belly.

The day he started work there, the tunnel owner led him to a well shaft secreted inside a tent. Suspended above it was a crossbar with a pulley attached, below which hung a harness for lifting and lowering goods and people. As he sat in the harness, a spool of metal cable turned on a winch, lowering him the sixty feet into the twilit bowels of the earth. Five to ten of them worked twelve-hour shifts, day and night, six days a week, communicating with the owner via a two-way radio that had receivers throughout the tunnel. They earned around $50 a shift but could go weeks or months between payments.

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And so an economy functions; not as others do, but money finds its way. He knew people who went by tunnel to the Egyptian side of Rafah for medical treatment, and had heard of VIP routes for wealthy travellers, complete with air-conditioning and cell phone reception.

He misses the market at Rafah, the noise and fumes of generators blending with the braying of donkeys, the piquant smoke of shawarma spits, row upon row of stands selling all that had emerged from the tunnels.

Were Yasmeen interested in the history of her country, he’d tell her how it has always been fought over. By Pharaohs, Hebrews, Philistines, Persians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Tatars, Mamluks, Ottomans. Later still Napoleon, the British, the Egyptians.

Armies marching into the desert relied on the city’s fortress walls and gushing wells, while for merchants Gaza was a bountiful marine spur of the spice routes and agricultural trade. Travellers sought out its inexpensive tobacco, its brothels; even now Israeli chefs covet Gaza’s strawberries and quail. Invaders to the shores these days would be greeted by bullet-pocked buildings, skeletal seaside cafés and fetid tide pools, while inland abandoned Israeli settlements lie decaying, their fields sanded over, their greenhouses ramshackle, weatherworn. Gaza’s airport, once a source of enormous pride, is now used only by herders grazing sheep, Bedouin feeding their camels.

But Yasmeen is only interested in the history of her grandfather. His father’s particular strength, his party piece, was playing multiple boards simultaneously, once going unbeaten against a circle of sixteen players, drawing only four games. Or he would challenge the local champion blindfolded, the moves communicated to him verbally by an arbiter, his father playing to the crowd, pretending 110

he’d lost track of the position before triumphing. His style, at a time when conservatism had come to dominate, was unswervingly aggressive, often sacrificing his queen in order to secure an outrageous win several moves later.

He played quickly whether games were time controlled or not, and became renowned for his ‘announced victories’, remarking to an incredulous opponent, ‘mate in five’, artifice that solicited both admirers and enemies.

H

e watches Yasmeen make a move and then retract it, a habit he needs to relieve her of. She loops a twine of hair round a finger in contemplation, every now and then emitting a sigh of self-admonishment at a strategy’s shortcomings. Her face, he realises, has a new configuration these days, the puppy fat of childhood receding to leave an angular, more exacting beauty.

The shell that damaged the black king that day also took away her brother, Hasan, and their mother. They had been told it was safe to return, a window of calm in which to gather belongings, to leave the relative safety of the UN facility. Yasmeen was tired so stayed behind, her brother insisting he come to help.

Less than a second after the explosion, rubble from the neighbour’s house surged through their windows and walls, half a home blasted into their own. When the air cleared and the ringing in his ears became something he could bear, he tried to stand but his legs would not obey him.

Later, as he sat bleeding by the side of the road, he watched as someone carried his wife’s body from the debris, laying her down beside him as if putting her to bed. The next day a crane removed large segments of the two homes that had become one. They found Hasan shortly before dusk.

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One of the last shells to fall this time landed in the cemetery at Jabalia, the dead – though as far as he knows not his dead – forced to partake in the suffering of the living, their ashen bones scattered about broken gravestones, in need of a second burying.

Y

asmeen calls to him. She has made her move, a simple pawn push, subtle but one that strengthens her position mid-board. It is conservative and he smiles, placing their food on the table. Once again he vows to mend the black king, to locate the leather-bound journal documenting her grandfather’s games. Chess, according to his father, is both art and science, the smoking out of an opponent’s king rarely achieved with cunning and intuition alone, requiring flair and bravura also. He believed in its poetry, its grace. Its solemn beauty.

After lunch he will check on the birds. Last year, on what would have been his wife’s forty-first birthday, he converted the space where Hasan’s room once stood into an aviary, in which around twenty birds now dwell: pigeons, sparrows, hummingbirds, creatures injured in the fighting, brought to him in boxes or towels once word got out. He has become known as the Birdman, the one who fixes the birds, though most won’t fly again. Some respond well, adapting to their internment; others fight it, fight each other. In time a few can be released, the ones he deems sufficiently recovered to survive, to take their chances. He asks those who bring them where the birds were found, in order to return them to the same patch of sky. He likes to watch them, their suspicion as he opens the door of the small wicker cage. There is a moment’s hesitancy as the terrain is assessed, as they scan for predators, and then they are gone.

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Photographs by Alex andr a Larsson Jacobson

as we see, ourselves

Postcards from the Ottoman Empire

IV. EASTANBUL Rowan Johnson

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n the Eastanbul Nar Art Cafe of The Magnaura Palace, the tourists gather to stroll down to the water. Across the street from the Egyptian Bazaar, an orange-juice seller leans against his cart and stares at them as they first cross the Galata Bridge and then board a boat down the Bosphorus toward the Marmara Sea and back again. The trip usually takes just over an hour, so he will soon be in the money again.

As the only orange-juice seller in this bazaar, he also offers ears of corn and nuts. Occasionally the locals demand ayl覺k abonman: monthly passes for their bus cards, but he stopped selling those a long time ago. Too much hassle. Now his survival depends on these tourists who buy his meager treats.

The boat returns, red crescent flag blazing in the setting sun. How many of these tourists know that just days before, during Eid al-Adha, some of this very Bosphorus was red in some places where the hooded teenagers and hirsute Turks in the bazaar slaughtered their sheep and left the blood flowing into the water?

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Alas, it seems, this city of the east and city of the west will never allow its waters to merge.

The tourists leave the boat and a few of them buy some corn and nuts from the orange juice seller. They pass the Blue Mosque on the way back to The Magnaura Palace.

The bottles of vodka and rum elongate the cafe in the cool lights. The tables fill the room with elaborate designs and the waiters take turns sneaking cigarettes as the night arrives. Between the hundreds of yellow taxis below, a random goat roams the Sultan Ahmet streets, eagerly devouring the corn and nuts the tourists tossed carelessly aside. The orange juice seller throws the goat a few more morsels and wheels his cart away from the loud evening.

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Above White Soil Beach Carl Boon Blonde harvesters of olives, thirty families of third-generation Bosnians live above White Soil Beach, waiting all summer for their profitable fruit.

Tourists arrive in Toyotas Saturday afternoons, and their children mingle in the Marmara Sea. They fling their fingers at rockfish and avoid the poisonous chestnuts clinging to the Devil’s Rocks, where in their myths Elia Kazan filmed sequences for a movie that never saw the screen.

I’ve been there among the glum, patient donkeys, the fig trees.

I’ve walked from the shore while their children watched me, their grandmothers tending geraniums in tin containers that once held cheese.

Their white-washed, blue-shuttered houses stand firm against the sun, but their boys would rather be in Istanbul, drinking beer on Freedom Street and patterning their futures on TV dramas and girls with black hair and black eyes.

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They silently despise their mackerel-fishermen-fathers who dance obnoxiously at weddings and never seem to tire of the sea.

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Testament of Innocence Ian C. Smith Late, beyond Killarney, his brogue grateful behind us, I turn the key but it snaps, a clean break, one half in the ignition, the other in my hand which I gape at as he continues talking.

After the ferry, greenery in burgeoning light subdued our bickering into a hushed tenderness.

Now, deciphering the posturing past, I think of Yeats; longed-for love hiding its face in a crowd of stars.

I hate to interrupt this stranger settling in oblivious of our problem, the leprechaun in his voice.

When it becomes obvious we are taking him nowhere I show them the busted key feeling cheated, tragic.

We exit our second-hand car shrugging foolishly.

Confused, he faces an empty road in changing light, sure, I think, Australians must all be eejits like us, footing it back to a garage that looked closed.

I considered describing the scene on a postcard keen to taste unusual, perhaps magical, experiences, seeking drama, a labyrinth of regret-proof memories for my old years beyond reach of imagination then.

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No customers, but the mechanic will come when less busy.

Silent in our crippled car, cloud mounting, she checks youth hostel booklets while I fiddle, try the key stub in its slot. A wrist-twist. Voila!

Executing U-turns like a stuntman I speed back, alert the mechanic with a solo horn flourish, race off sensing his opinion echoes that of our man who has vanished, hitched on into the Celtic twilight.

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Sometimes, as We Move Closer to Autumn Kelli Allen Generosity weighs the pear boughs down. Blooms this late in any season are a warning. We have abandoned gathering blossoms, but we carry their scent on our skin from pressing our backs, shoulders, into their ground nestings moments before these words, left now, for you. We are involved in keeping this tangling quiet, the way an inheritance is expected by trees, through wind, swept as sugar from hearth to threshold. I believe in baptism the way the river carries convicts and lovers both closer to something like the sea. There is no end to my hands covering your eyes. We are fine lines carving the old rocks and no tree here, no matter its sweetness, its ripe remembering, can convince us that the secret things are brighter when we give them proper names.

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Walking through the Morning Kelli Allen You may have slept all night and we walk together past the horses, who are out early on this Sunday and their necks bending down becomes the prologue for this: I saw you carry your boots, cradle them as oysters plucked too soon from cool brine. The mud, you told me later, came from the river, undersides of oak and willow pocking leather. It does not matter where you decide to rest the objects you value. It matters even less how such labor is as perishable as the apple rolling by your bare feet.

The mares don’t see us as we see ourselves, as I look at you and say “Dear one. Never mind. you were already come and gone. I made the bed up tight. The lights are on. They’re still on.”

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The Germans Are Coming (excerpt from a memoir) Sybil Baker

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fter scrubbing any traces of my own messy life from the oven and the bathroom tiles, I fell asleep on the love seat waiting for the Germans to arrive. It was closer to midnight than not, and outside had long since gone dark. Usually at this time of year—early January— the living room where I dozed would be warm from the dying embers of the logs from the fire Rowan had built, but this night all I could do was toss on a throw, close my eyes, and hope that the Germans were still coming, that they’d not been detained by immigration at the Atlanta airport or gotten lost driving to Chattanooga. Earlier that day I’d packed a suitcase with enough clothes to survive seven months, three seasons, and nine countries, which Rowan had deposited in a bedroom on the second floor of George and Anita’s house in our old neighborhood of Martin Luther King, a room we were renting at a very reasonable rate for the next month before I left for Cyprus.

In February, I was going to be a visiting professor at a university in Cyprus where I’d continue my sabbatical writing project, and Rowan was to follow at the end of 133

April, when he finished teaching at our university. We planned to spend July traveling around south-eastern Europe, something we’d been looking forward to for the past year. We both loved traveling, especially to places that let us see the world differently. Even though we’d travel cheaply, we still needed enough cash to pay our mortgage and fund our travels, which we wouldn’t have unless we brought in some extra income. We decided our best option was to rent out our house.

A few months earlier, shortly after we’d abandoned our scheme to buy a rundown house in our old neighborhood for cash, Rowan learned a professor from Germany was looking for a furnished house to rent for six months starting in January. Our house, a few blocks from campus and near downtown, was perfect for the professor, and we agreed, over an email handshake, to rent the house to him for six months. That we would have to move out of our house while we were still in Chattanooga was a problem we were sure we’d resolve, a minor inconvenience. We were not homeless, but, as my father-in-law would say, untethered.

But as the weeks crept closer to the German family’s arrival, Rowan and I still hadn’t secured a temporary dwelling. We couldn’t find a furnished apartment on a month-to-month lease for less than what we were charging the Germans. Even AirBnB, still a nascent industry in Chattanooga, didn’t yield any options. Our friends around town offered us their spare bedrooms, but we were wary of the negative long-term effects cohabitation might have on our friendships. We were no longer twenty-something vagabonds, but mid-career professionals long settled into routines and patterns. We were running out of options.

Then one evening in late November, after a few drinks in our basement bar, where such decisions are usually made, George insisted we stay with him and Anita. Before we’d 134

bought our current house, we’d been neighbors. We’d spent a lot of time at their house, eating George’s chili or barbeque and greens, sitting on the screened back porch drinking beer stocked in a mini-fridge, or, late mornings, working together on a garden we planted and cultivated in the loamy soil of their back yard because the rocky soil of our own yard a few feet away couldn’t grow anything.

We’d celebrated Obama’s first election there (we were the only whites in the very festive house), gone to parties for visiting writers and aging relatives, celebrated birthdays, and watched movies on their obscenely large flat screen TV. None of us could figure out why we hadn’t thought of staying with them before.

Our weekly rental gesture would keep George in smokes, contribute to the eternal upgrades an old house demands, as well as sponsor an occasional meal out with Anita. We’d be back in our old neighborhood, a place we’d missed with the nostalgic tenderness of an immigrant for her homeland. Only later did I find out that George got some shit from his male friends for letting a white girl live in his house. After all, a white girl in a black family’s house could only lead to trouble. But George and Anita and Rowan and I had been friends for years. The only trouble we’d gotten into with George in the past was drinking too much and staying up too late. Now we were getting too old for even that.

Close to midnight I woke up to our digital doorbell, and the German professor, standing on our porch, blearyeyed and jet-lagged, apologized for being late. Behind him trailed his wife and three daughters. After giving them a quick tour with promises to help them settle in the next day, we drove the mile and a half from the north to the south side of campus to George and Anita’s, dragged in the last of our belongings, and settled into the spare bedroom 135

upstairs with its surprisingly comfortable mattress, our home for the next month.

That first morning I watched the sun rise over Lookout Mountain from our bedroom window—I’d forgotten how orange and pink the sky could be. I looked past George and Anita’s barren backyard, where a future garden promised to grow, over to the yard of the house we rented to strangers, and tried to imagine our mystery tenants witnessing that same sun shining on the industrial railroad tracks and the mountains beyond. Only a mile and a half away in our house the Germans were now occupying, the early morning runners and bicyclists would be fitnessing their way on the Riverwalk that ran in front of the tall hedges of our own front lawn.

Being in our old neighborhood in our friend’s house didn’t make sense exactly. It at least felt right. Within a few days at George and Anita’s, Rowan and I established our routine. Rowan was up by five each morning, stealthily creaking down the stairs and out the front door into the darkness. He’d drive our car to the gym, where he’d run miles on the treadmill, soak in the sauna, shower, and shave before shacking up in his office for the rest of the day. Although Rowan was definitely the tidier half of our marriage, his office, a glassed-in space in our university’s new library, was cluttered with the accoutrements of a homeless hoarder: my Keurig coffee maker and boxes of coffee pods, a sleeping pad and bag under his desk, suitcases full of stuff we’d brought from our house that we may or may not use during our displacement, half-open boxes of breakfast bars and other packaged snacks. He’d spend the longer part of most days there in that office, drinking cups of coffee from the Keurig pods, sustaining himself with granola bars and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when he wasn’t teaching. Eventually as the sun fell, he’d return to our room at George and Anita’s, where 136

he’d do the crossword or read a book before falling asleep by eight.

I would wake up at little bit later than Rowan, at 6:30 or so, watch the sun rise, boil water in a kettle we kept in the room, and drink Starbucks instant coffee.

Sometimes I’d hear Anita getting her mother Evelyn, who lived downstairs, ready to go to the nursing home she stayed at during the day, then showering and leaving for the community college where she was a math professor.

George, who stayed up most nights past midnight was still sleeping when I left the house, gym bag in tow, to shower at the gym on campus.

Because we didn’t use the kitchen, we ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and breakfast bars, storing our supplies under the bed we slept in. We also kept a loaf of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly in the trunk of our car. Before I moved from Arlington, Virginia, to Seoul in 1995, I knew a man named Mr. Cho who worked at the Georgetown Library. Although he’d been educated in one of the top universities in Seoul, he’d fled a desperately poor and authoritarian Korea in the early sixties. He and his wife, a nurse, had bought a house in the DC suburbs, then saved to buy a bigger house which they rented out to diplomats and other rich people. Their own modest house had a tiny old-fashioned black and white TV and furniture they never replaced. One time, Mr. Cho bought his wife tickets to a movie for her birthday and she yelled at him for being so frivolous. There was never any jewelry or dinners out or other nice things, instead there was the immigrants’ focus on saving and generating wealth to pay for their daughters’ educations (one went to Harvard, the other to Georgetown) and as a security against the unknown. As Mr. Cho often said, “Nobody knows the future.” As banal and obvious as the phrase seemed, for the next twenty years I would return to Mr. Cho’s statement, sometimes 137

invoking it myself, other times pondering it like a Zen koan.

Our reasons for living out of our car and a boarding house, for not eating in restaurants with our friends or knowing where we’d stay, while not as extreme, had something in common with the immigrants’ mentality.

Rowan had grown up rich and privileged in South Africa.

When his family immigrated to Canada, they lost most of their fortune, and eventually scattered. Even after Rowan’s mother and brother returned to South Africa to help the country rebuild, the fractured family never recovered spiritually or financially. The US was the fourth country Rowan had lived in, the fourth country where he had to start over. Our friends, comfortable native-born American homeowners all, no doubt thought that our chosen untethered living out of a suitcase, eating from the trunk of a car, was a bit crazy.

And it was crazy from a middle class American point of view. But Rowan and I had lived in Korea for years, sleeping on a yo on the floor of our one bedroom apartment.

We’d lived without an oven and a car, and loved every minute of it. We’d traveled in countries without hot water or electricity, witnessed families for whom living out of a car was a life of privilege. Some of those families were right here in Chattanooga. There was something about our silly scheme that connected us in a small way to those forced to make larger and more significant sacrifices. And, too, there was the adventure of it all.

I guess this uprootedness was our last cry against the inevitable settling of our lives. Besides the house was too big for just Rowan to live in while I was away in Cyprus. Rowan also was itching for a change himself—a last chance to play the rambling man, the vagabond, the flaneur. Our month eating sandwiches from the trunk of 138

our car and living out of a bedroom was just a rehearsal for that summer when we’d be doing the same, except by then we’d have backpacks instead of a car trunk to store our peanut butter and jelly.

About once a week, we returned to our house to check on the Germans, to help them navigate our Roku streaming player or show them how to use our washer and dryer or to turn off our wi-fi. The German professor lamented that on his sabbatical in South Dakota five years earlier, his nowteenage daughters had integrated quickly into American life, but this time they spent most of their time chatting on social media instead of making friends in real life.

Our house was now just a slightly familiar place we were visiting. Unfamiliar shoes of varying colors and sizes were scattered at the back entrance—pink little girl’s sneakers, men’s running shoes, chunky heeled boots. The house always carried the heavy nourishing smell of a roast or a stew. Once, the Germans invited us to a small party in the basement bar of our own house. One of the neighbors, who in an almost miraculous coincidence was from Austria and had a six-year-old bilingual son, was invited. Cans of warm beer sat on the bar. Rowan drank a glass of whisky and I had a glass of wine. We played a few games of darts before returning to our small room at George’s. In a few weeks the Germans were more integrated and engaged with our neighbors than we’d ever been. It was as if we’d never lived there.

After a month at George’s we moved out. I flew to Cyprus a few days before Valentine’s Day. Rowan found a one-bedroom apartment on AirBnB that he rented for a month at a farm near the Chickamauga Battlefield in Georgia, a forty-minute drive from campus. After that month, Rowan decided to move a bit closer into town, 139

and he tried his luck at a string of dubious extended stay motels. The rooms were sufficient, but the clientele could be rough, so Rowan decided to park our Miata on campus to keep it from being broken into.

While I was comfortably settled in my apartment on campus in Cyprus, Rowan’s adventure in rootlessness was turning sour. Although he would lock himself in his hotel room before the sun went down, he couldn’t sleep well because of the commotion from drug dealers and prostitutes in adjacent rooms. One night Rowan listened as a pimp outside his room fought all night with prostitutes. At three a.m., Rowan finally peeked out of his curtain and saw a man, shirtless with chains around his chest, pacing the hall. As soon as the sun rose and the coast was clear, Rowan checked out, walking three miles past derelict stores and gas stations through dark tunnels and stretches of highway until he reached the Starbucks on Broad Street, which opened at six a.m. There he could read the paper and prepare for class, and then walk a few more miles to the gym on campus where he’d work out before his office hours began at nine, even though he knew no students would come to see him.

Months later when Rowan told me about his brush with danger, I chastised him, of course, but I was not too surprised. This was a guy who had ended up in even more dangerous situations—waking up in the middle of a township in Johannesburg in a truck he’d fallen asleep in, having a gun pulled on him in an alley in Jamaica, hiking overnight by himself with no protection except a kitchen knife, which he wielded by his tent as he listened to the coyotes howl. Foolish? Lucky? Yes. But I also couldn’t help but believe some benevolent spirit was watching out for him.

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After bouncing around in his extended stay hotels for a few weeks and spending a few nights at the hostel downtown, Rowan spent the last three weeks renting a room from our friends who lived in a pleasant suburb in Hixson, about twenty minutes from school. He was a good tenant, leaving in the mornings and not arriving until late in the evenings, his presence ghostlike, almost invisible.

Our friends cried when he left, saying he was welcome back any time.

And then, finally at the end of April with our mortgage paid down, cash in the bank, and the final grades posted for the semester, Rowan flew to Istanbul, ten pounds heavier than when I last saw him in February, the toll of living off of takeout and a car trunk kitchen visible on his waistline, despite all the walking he’d done. After a long weekend in Istanbul we flew to Cyprus, where he fell in love with the two-bedroom furnished apartment on a campus surrounded by olive groves and blue sky that met the ocean’s horizon. Within a few days, we reestablished our routines from our house the Germans were still happily renting, routines Rowan had to forgo the past four months: buying food and cooking it at home, making coffee in the mornings in a French press, cleaning the house, going on long walks and runs, drinking a beer on the balcony overlooking the vast rust-colored landscape dotted with shrub and olive trees and a flock of sheep. On weekends we traveled by bus or rented car around Cyprus.

After a month and half, we met my family in Marmaris in Turkey, and then after that we flew to Vienna, and by train and bus spent the next month making our way back to Istanbul.

In Budapest, we got an email from our German professor.

A business professor at our university needed to rent a 141

furnished house for a month, which coincidentally, was the very month-long gap between when the Germans left and we returned. The dates overlapped almost perfectly—we’d only have to stay at a hotel in Chattanooga for a few days.

Another month of rent would help pay for the unplanned housing expenses of that summer: a cracked coil in the air conditioner, so that the upstairs where the Germans slept was as sweltering as a shuttered attic, and a leaking roof in the rental house that required major work to fix. What were a few more days in a cheap hotel, after all this? Then in Bucharest, the German emailed us again: somebody working at Volkswagen was looking for a house to rent downtown. The rent he could pay was almost double our mortgage.

In Thessaloniki during the middle of the Greek financial crisis we discussed renting our house out again.

We could live in a one bedroom or a studio, and then pay our house off in record time, which would enable us to retire early in South Africa or Cyprus, where Rowan had decided he wanted to sell fresh squeezed orange juice from a cart on a beach. Cyprus had the best oranges we’d ever tasted, beyond sweet and juicy, and you could buy a bag of them for a dollar because the oranges were grown in North (occupied) Cyprus, which lived under a trade embargo.

But as the travels wore on and we grew more weary of schlepping backpacks and living off of gyros (the ten pounds Rowan had quickly shed had migrated to me), we decided we wanted to live in our own house again, at least for a while. Instead we planned to finish the basement, with the idea of one day converting it into an apartment we could live in while we rented the rest of the house out.

Mr. Cho, I was pretty sure, would have rented the entire house out and spent the next ten years living in George and Anita’s spare bedroom. The immigrant knows that 142

its best to save as much money as possible as an insurance against the unkown. I chided myself for being a bit soft.

In the end, I was a fake immigrant.

This wandering, these decisions, this returning, these schemes were my luxuries.

The luxury of living out of a backpack because I want to. The luxury of having a home and a job and people I love to return to. The luxury of counting on those things.

In August, after seven glorious months of sleeping in other beds and other sheets and of other people sleeping in ours, we returned home. On the surface, little had changed—our sofa and dining room table were where we’d left them, our dishes remained stacked and clean in the cupboard, and our fixed air-conditioning hummed with expected efficiency. Our bedroom furniture had been rearranged, but Rowan and I decided to keep the bed where the Germans had left it, across from the dresser, allowing more light into the room. Over the next few weeks I found traces of our guests: the Japanese professor’s cat hair stuck in air vents and coating our old velvet chair, a zip hoodie left by one of the teenage girls, and happy butterfly stickers affixed on our windows, hiding behind the drawn blinds. In another corner I found sparkly pink ponytail holders, which I secured in my own thin hair before for my morning workouts. Except for these ghostly reminders of the people who’d occupied our house, it was like we never left. Erasure, it seemed, was easier than I’d thought.

Soon after we returned, George came over to catch up over a few beers. On our deck as the strivers biked and ran past us on the Riverwalk, we discussed our summers. Then George told us he was going to renovate his basement and rent it out. We admitted we had similar plans.

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“I can’t let those white guys take over my neighborhood,” he said, lighting a Parliament. I didn’t remind him that not only had the whites taken over his neighborhood, that two of them—Rowan and I—had rented a room in his house. “I got some ideas, and Rowan, my brother, we have got to talk.”

For that moment, before a part of MLK became the renamed Innovation District, as if new buildings for white people were an idea whose time had come instead of one as old as the hills, before a few blocks from George’s house the high-rise for students would be completed, before the coffee shops and retail opened, before we learned that Volkswagen lied about its emissions testing, endangering Chattanooga’s own automobile plant, before Germany’s open-arms policy of welcoming the Syrian refugees began to falter, before all this and all that would come, with George and Rowan and me on our deck under the same stars shining on those fleeing a world that no longer existed, for that moment, I was happy enough to be tethered to this fragile life of mine, to a future nobody knows.

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Charybdis Valentina Cano Every afternoon: weaving what I’ve unwoven at night.

A story that a woman gazing out at the empty glass ocean could recognize.

A story that has grown mythic tails and legendary claws, one that swims through these tropical hours making a loop of my days.

Leaving me scattered and heavy with salt.

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Camping in the Desert K ari Wergeland The dusty brown hills, rippling past the Civic – stuffed with sleeping bags, tents, and coolers – are dotted with smooth boulders burned clean by the sun.

Who knows how they got there?

Perhaps a giant scooped all the stones he could gather in one hand, only to pointedly release each finger until his palm stretched out parallel to the earth.

And the stones tumbled to the ground, and some continued rolling down gentle slopes, while others held fast.

Worn by water, the surface changes— this gash in the hot dry hills.

Tinkling sounds feed a denser line of life— green things overcoming grit as they flip, become shade for soft creatures.

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The moon, illuminated in the blue of day, guides hikers down the path to flatness, ocotillo wackiness.

This orb is bright in the night sky that blackens by the hour as curly lines brush the dimly lit ground, and coyotes sing.

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River Country Jeff Alfier July, and a man fishes the Yellowstone from the trestle of a derelict rail bridge.

In the near distance, a young woman with a new backpack, stares down Route 89 toward the interstate.

She hangs a thumb in the air for southbound traffic. The worries of her parents back home in White Sulphur Springs are carried by the soles of her new Sketchers.

Her ears still hold to the Van Morrison an old man played in his Dodge truck as he gave her a lift the length of Meagher County.

A Bozeman busboy hangs from her heart.

There is, in her coat pocket, a gift for him, a song she wrote to unfold in his voice as he laces her lines between the strings of his guitar, his fingertips calloused with chords she wants the night air to touch.

What they have is not boxed candy or a Hallmark crush—it is earth and humid sky, railroad ballast, coarse stones of the Gallatin River they’ll steal barefoot over, to a palm reader 148

back in town, on West Main, their music weaving into their skin, un-rinsed by water, nor the miles between them, even when she lifts her hand again on that highway north, her lifeline in the air.

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Shabbat Valentina Cano I heard of you.

I heard of you from voices hushed by sunset, on the crackle of bird’s feathers as they retreated into their shadows.

I heard on the hum of television sets flicking alive and smiling for attention.

I heard of you and closed the doors.

Sat down with my pulsing silence to wait.

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Consider the Mayfly Milton Montague think you have it bad ? consider the mayfly born reproduces dies all within 48 hours good thing they cannot think else they’d go on strike or something equally preposterous think on it untold billions are born every May consumed by fish and birds in less than two days what if they refused to cooperate and lived for a whole week think of the consequences

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Vertigo Maja Lukić I am tumbling sideways & the world’s colors drain to the right of vertigo.

Paint slides wildly from a dream canvas.

I return to balance — outside is a deep drop into yellow milky light, as if after a storm.

I grow into a tree pose — it barely blooms, blind elbows & knees.

April bleeds by, past torpor, past dozens of pigeons eating broken glass on the sidewalk.

The mirrors grow their mold & nothing is echoed without dust.

I’m not a symmetrical being but I’m trying to be when I seek orientation 152

in crystal-cut gin & time retrogrades like a video watched once before it’s erased.

Sometimes I miss the time zone of a Parisian dream — a chancy sky of melted silver, lazy streaking white — the same sky on the day that a strange man — I called him Vertigo — grabbed my thigh on rue du Turenne, as if to toss me to the side of something.

But back then I didn’t care.

Back then I walked straight lines.

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Big as Life Derek Sugamosto A huge balloon-man dances, smiling his profile etched by dusk.

His tether is taut, stretched from a post that otherwise holds one end of a banner.

In bold print, below a giant groundless foot is a hearty invitation to come and look at the horizon of cars lately used.

The balloon-man shifts his weight slowly to the right at the whim

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of the wind so that the sun now colors the air within him, suddenly a hot orange.

The tether grapples with the change.

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Tonight (After Agha Shahid Ali) Tom Br adstreet & Ă…sa Samuelsson

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s dusk falls I hear the call to prayer. The voice is younger than I remember, and more distant. It seems to come from the mountains, to get caught in the fissures of the unpainted streets; it sweeps into the open windows of houses I pretend to remember, searching for the ears of people who have never stopped listening.

It escapes me, bouncing off the patterned curtains of balconies, through the lines of washing draped overhead.

Whatever is left of the call, I try to grasp. I think this is the way.

Others have heard the call too. Through saffron passageways, through yellow waves of samosa they emerge.

I follow an old man, a man who might once have sold me a chapati or taught me a lesson. Children run past in the opposite direction. How many calls are being answered tonight? How many directions can one go? Childhood streets should need no map. I look up for guidance, but the Mughal ceiling of night-sky is milky with the reflected lights of Kashmir. I think this is the way.

The thin call emanates like a chill wind from the opening of every road. I turn. The tumbledown walls 156

of closed shops reach upwards towards roofs that bow gently over the narrow alley, their corrugated foreheads almost touching. A lone vendor draped in bright linen and gemstones pushes a white shirt upon my chest—as if there is a dress code that I have forgotten. Three women stand by the red light of an open door, smiling. They know I am lost but I think this is the way.

I reach the empty square. In the middle stands the fountain in which I used to swim. I sit on the side. The stone elephants are dry, and broken; one is missing both its ears. The call sounds again. It is louder now, and pained, and it runs in frantic circles around the square, around the fountain, in search of somebody who is missing. It runs past me, once, twice. I feel it on my shoulder, though it does not slow. As the sound vanishes, its backdraft lifts me back to my feet. I think this is the way.

The trail leads me to the door of a building that looks like a temple. The gargoyles do not see me arrive. All the windows are barred; all the doors are closed. I stand before the entrance and place an ear on the lacquered wood. On the other side, I am sure I can hear the murmur of voices.

I test the door: once, twice. It will not give. I hear the call once more. It is a cry, now, the sour, wounded sobbing of the returned and the forgotten. I think this is the way.

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translations

Basil Bunting’s Shadow Robyn Bolam Whooom. I wake.

Whoom, whoom. In bed I love the plaintive bass of horns at sea.

Sailors’ extended voices warning, warning, as day rises through fog.

Safe and warm on land, I pray no ill befalls the vessels’ close community. Though invisible to one another, let them pass uneventfully in these southern waters that you sailed and I sail now.

In a room cold as a bell, the see-saw horn of the first train roused my young self from sleep before early-morning workers, rattling in carriages, stop-started at Prudhoe Station for Newcastle Central.

The faces, on the train from Carlisle carrying me to my new school, are gone.

Yet I have kept the signal box, fire-warmed waiting-room, the station master’s chickens and my favourite bridge, half-moon, single span, its wrought-iron arches

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embracing bursts of green as wheels rail-hugged through them to cross the Tyne at Wylam, where you caught your train to work at the Chronicle, scribbling Brigg flatts to the same rhythm I finished my homework.

It drowned out the river’s elegies for the ruined castle that Turner once thought worth capturing on canvas before trees screened it between houses and factory.

Something was being mourned long before I travelled with my teenage love, now lost, long before these more than fifty years passed.

Something was always being mourned by the wind from the north that scoured the engineering works and shipyards.

I’m sure you heard it too. We never met but, in the Newcastle early-morning rush, perhaps our shadows touched uneventfully.

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The Beetle

George Neary

Sat waiting, waiting for something the train to Göteborg.

The sun over Trollhättan slowly burns and hues Caucasian skin.

The station

concrete and soaked in sweltering warmth like the walls of winter sauna.

Slow, stifling

the heart of Earth beats wild crazy like a dog in heat.

Listen close to the sound of youth The sounds of this strange as beer bottles sing Yankee obsession, the hymns of summer how it draws them all

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boys in Buicks their dads in a Dodge but not a Viking nor Saab in sight.

The beetle at my feet she passes by through a mountain of ash.

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Europa Mel Perry Their statue rises before me.

Town hall gallery light torrents across the tiles, spirals, seeps into bronze.

The bull that had stamped, pawed the ground, ground the sand where blue pooled, is knuckled now.

His horn, which had once fondled kelp filaments in sea shallows, rests, alert, waiting her call.

She has been lifted up atop the bull, poised, no longer in submission for her points of touch, fingers, knee, ankles hold him as she reaches strength and spirit north, west from a Mediterranean shore.

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Her right hand on his arching tongue, where caress conquers grip.

Her feet in the sculptor-smoothed furrows of his flank, where embrace triumphs tenure.

The scalloped wave where once she had played billows now from her shoulder from hurricanes to zephyrs, breaths of safety.

Her lands of forests, lakes, islands, mountains, coasts from Baltic to Atlantic are ready.

Ready, ready for Europa’s people will open harbours, to save and let in love.

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Afrah and Furat Tim Robbins I almost wake up. Almost miss my bonus dream: Afrah and Furat coming from the halal sex shop just opened in Holy Mecca. Afrah with her skater’s slouch, covered with a baseball cap. (She once came to my class uncovered — her dense black brush, the plushest I’ve ever seen.) Afrah in blue jeans and Converse high-tops. Furat, formed and draped like a living altar. Jewels glowing candle-warm. A sky-blue hijab framing her sly smile. A long pleated skirt flowing from fruitful hips. Her slippered feet as she walks to the car peep from under the hem, steady with purpose.

Afrah slides behind the wheel. Furat cradles the scented candles in their ornamental box on her lap.

Waking, I think of Michigan Snow and Saudi Sand.

Woman and Man. Lesbian and Gay. Christian and Muslim. Sunni and Shia. Student and Teacher. Lipstick and Butch. If opposites attract, it’s because no two lovers are wholly opposite. Even the most are only

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a little. We used to sit before school at sidewalk tables by the sleeping pizzeria. They aimed their cigarette smoke at heaven. Our knowledge of each other was like a festive meal — delicious and nourishing — but in a lifetime, what is a single meal? Even the last repast before a state executes us for our otherwise unstoppable love. I hope this email address is still good. I wish I could be useful. Could give them each an animal, a fierce protector whose ears would always be cocked for the sound of their voice. Alas, kindness is all I can muster. My lovely nomads, you have recovered your heritage here on the other side of the world.

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Time Is a River Without Banks Lucy Durneen Not even the so-called elements are constant.

Listen, and I will tell you of their changes.

Ovid, Metamorphoses.

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he beauty of the house was not in any doubt. It was small compared to the last place, but it had views.

Some renovation was needed, which the agent said meant it had potential to add value: interested parties should try to see beyond the flock and the linoleum, and certainly ought not to be afraid of damp. Damp was something you just had to live with in this part of the country. If you couldn’t live with damp, the agent wanted to say, there would be other, more fundamental things you would not be able to live with around here.

The couple that came to view the house had been married a long time but they had only just now had a baby. It had been a struggle, that was what the mother told people, and she meant more than just the fight to conceive.

The father told people that now they were looking to 169

settle, it was time to put down roots. Every time he said it the mother felt she was living in a way that was nothing like the conscious way in which human beings are alive, as if she had no choice but to simply grow and flower, and so putting down roots, gripping hold of the ground, was simply an effort not to die.

The agent was right about the house needing work but the husband felt it was an appropriate amount according to his equation, which was based on ten per cent returns, and good enough in this market. The walls were silver and damp, and the mother looked beyond them and imagined how the baby would sit on the kitchen floor banging pots and pans together. In some rooms the walls were mottled as fish skin. But they kept on walking round the house and the mother kept saying how good it was they could add value. The father tickled the baby under the chin and the mother went back and ran her hands over the wallpaper, asking herself if she could live with it for as long as it took and deciding that she could, she probably could.

The couple were impressed by the garden and the French windows in the sitting room, which let in a glut of light and made the mother feel heavy just to stand there, as if the weight of the light had compressed her in some way. There were only two bedrooms, but this was okay because it had taken so long for the baby that the mother in particular did not want to go through all that again. But when she walked into what would be the baby’s bedroom, the mother saw something that she didn’t like quite so much.

“Did this use to be an entrance?” she asked the agent.

“It looks like it might have been an old entrance to the house.”

“It’s got steps down to the garden,” the agent said, throwing open the door onto a wooden balcony. The balcony spread the length of the first floor and there were 170

woods in the distance, a dark mineral green, a dimness of mist, then sky. The sky was strapped to the land by a flash of water. Then the mother could see that it was not water but in fact more sky, deep and flooding above the tops of the trees.

“It could be a real feature,” the agent said. “If you did it up, this balcony would definitely add value.”

“What are we talking?” the father said. “Five, ten thousand?”

“Oh no,” said the mother. “No, we couldn’t have that.

I just can’t help think, what if someone climbed up those steps and got in during the night? Into the baby’s room. I don’t think I could sleep worrying someone might get in.”

The father said, “Are you serious?”

“It’s a safe neighbourhood,” the agent said. “You just don’t hear of things like that happening here.”

“Maybe not round here,” said the mother, and her husband knew she was thinking of the two girls in the town where she grew up. But still he said, “See, it’s not a problem.”

“I don’t know,” the mother said and you could tell by the way she went over to the door and touched the handle that she really didn’t. “I just can’t help but think of it. It’s all I would think of.” She slipped her little finger inside the key hole, felt how it could turn or hold fast if there was someone on the other side. She said, “What if the baby opens the door herself when she gets bigger? Can you imagine if she fell?”

“It’s okay,” the father said. “We can nail it shut or something. We could, right?” he said, looking at the agent.

The agent, who was young and indifferent, said probably they could. They would lose the feature, but yes they could do that. She said this in such a way that made it sound obscene and the mother felt a quiet rage against all the people of the world who had no fear except for the loss 171

of features and value. The mother didn’t look at the agent.

She inspected the frame of the door, how it would give way, understood the urgent desire its opening would invite in. She knew she probably ought to, but the mother would not look at the estate agent.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to put a table and chairs out here?” the agent said. “It would be an incredible feature.”

They all stood for a moment, looking at the woods far off at the edge of the moorland that touched the back garden, which you would be able to see if the door was open and there were a table and chairs on the balcony. The mother felt a pulling sensation, as if she needed to swim or as if the next step would take her ten feet in the air. Then the baby gurgled and it was as if the memory of the earth had never left her. She was thinking of other things now.

“Since when could you tell a shovel from a tyre iron?” the mother asked, because she knew her husband, and she hadn’t married him for his practical skills.

“I’ll get someone in,” he said. “I want this house. I think it’s going to make a damn fine investment.”

“But what about a damn fine home?”

“Sure. That too.”

T

hey had two vans deliver the furniture from their rented house and still the father had to go back for odds and ends, boxes of things that were his wife’s alone, a microscopic version of her childhood that she kept sealed up and protected. He asked himself more than once if all women did this. Of the women he had loved, she was the only one with such nostalgia. He put the boxes straight up into the attic and he didn’t look in them. He didn’t think she ever looked in the boxes. But it was important they knew everything was there, that the things inside were like an anchor, weighting her.

The father got a man in to fix the door straight away. As 172

time went on his wife began to think of other, necessary things for the future, such as home-schooling and a reliable internet connection, but for now it was just the door and the father wanted to get on with it, to show her he meant what he said. He watched how the handyman first battened across the architraves with lengths of 2x4 and then boarded the doorway with sheets of Gyprock. It was as if the door to the balcony had never been there. The father had no idea if it was the correct way to do it but the man had all the right tools and he worked fast, and that had to count for something. “Good man, Roberto,” he said, hardly knowing what he was thanking the handyman for. You couldn’t see the door and you couldn’t open the door, which was what he had paid him to do when it came to it. But if you looked up at the house from the outside you could see the sealed shadow of where the door had been, and ghoulishly it reminded the handyman, who was from Umbria, of the doors of the dead that were found in old Italian houses.

“You know I love you,” the mother said to her husband when she came up to the room to put the baby to bed.

“You do, don’t you?”

“You can’t see the door any more,” the father said, touching the wall with a professional sweep as if he had done the work himself.

“What about window locks?” the mother said. “Do you think we should have some of those too?” She looked out across the moor to the woods where the trees had disappeared, evening out the landscape as though the dark had simply pressed down into the shape of the world and removed them. Always she felt the need to keep the woods out. It seemed that in the dark there was no way of telling anything that might happen in the world and if everything that was solid and ancient outside could dissolve, then so might she. The mother thought it couldn’t be a coincidence 173

so many deaths and births occur at night. She put the baby in the cot and pulled the blankets snug. The baby moved in a slow arc towards the top of the cot and the mother put out her hand, felt the curve of her daughter’s head like an egg cupped into her palm.

“He’s done a grand job,” she said to her husband.

“There’s not a chance anyone’s getting in or out now.”

But the father said nothing. He pushed her against the wall where there was no longer a door; gently, so he could kiss her. But he did not then kiss in a gentle way. It was nice to kiss like that, for a change. The mother didn’t say it, but surprise was the only way to describe it, yes. She could still see out of the window, towards the stillness of the woods where there were no lights and no people.

Everything outside the window was the colour of indigo and bone. She felt the stillness like a fluid substance. Like water it seeped through the snag of roots, from branch to branch; it found a gap into the open air, pushed through a suffocation of pine limbs. The stillness rushed across the moor and the garden, licking the footings of the house and the balcony, as if they might be afloat. Little, buoyant airs nudged around the mother’s arms, beneath her feet. “Did you hear that noise?” she said. “The baby.” Her husband’s voice came as if it were inside her, swimming like a cell in her blood, pushing through muscle and bone. She felt it deep in the savage hollow of her belly. Every beat of her heart was a word. “There’s no noise,” he was saying. “No noise.”

When the morning came the mother realised they must have fallen asleep right there on the floor. The sunrise felt like the surprise of the earth at finding itself still here in the solar system. The red of the sun was ancient and the shock was stratospheric, pushing out through the whole sky.

“The windows,” the mother said. “I don’t know.”

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“I can ask Roberto to board them out,” the father said into her neck. “If you want me to, I can do that.

T

hey had been in the house a while and the baby was about ten, although sometimes the mother felt she wasn’t quite sure that so many years had passed. The market had changed somewhat and the potential to add value to the house was not what it had been, but nothing remains the same, and the mother was glad somehow that the world had caught itself on. Yet in other ways everything remained as it had been. They continued to do all the same things they had done in their rented house but it turned out that putting down roots meant those things now seemed real, as if they had just been rehearsing before. Sometimes the mother wanted to shout: this lasagne is fabulous! Or, look how clean the floor is! as if those were lines she had only been practising in that earlier time, holding them in until the right time came. There were whole days when the mother wondered exactly what it was they had been doing before, as if it had all been about waiting, like ancient fish just biding their time until fins became legs and they could walk or run.

To make up for the fact there were no longer any views from the baby’s bedroom the mother, who had been to art college, pinned up bunting cut from triangles of rainbow cotton and covered the walls with prints of famous paintings; mainly Chagall, some Kahlo; there had been a Picasso that gave the daughter nightmares. Every morning the mother would come into her daughter’s room and say, “I love you, what do you need? More toast? Something to read?”

“I’m okay,” her daughter said more often than not, because it was just a routine; there was no real requirement for her to want more toast or have a desire to read anything.

The daughter was dark-haired, which was the way of all 175

the women on the father’s side of the family, and her head looked too heavy for her shoulders, which was also like her father from some angles. Of her mother’s heritage there was really very little visible sign, which the mother found hard at times, as if she had failed to assert her own biology, which should have been such a simple thing.

“Always my baby girl,” the mother said, tidying shelves, straightening a book. It felt like a question, sometimes.

Sometimes her daughter answered, yes; sometimes she didn’t.

The mother liked to look at the paintings with her daughter. It didn’t matter that they were just copies and you could only guess at the passion of the brushstrokes or how the artist had pushed the paint around the canvas.

It became a way to pass time that felt more truthful than hands moving around a clock face. The father especially was proud that his daughter’s first word had been impasto.

“This one is my favourite,” the mother said. “It’s called The Birthday. See how much the man and woman adore each other? Even the room is too small for them. It’s like the city outside is calling to them. It’s like the sky is asking them to come and explore.” She wanted to say something more. This one is about love, she wanted to say. I love you this way, baby girl. In another picture a fish swam amongst the stars. In another, a cat transformed into a woman, a cockerel carried a bride towards the Garden of Eden. It was hard to know how to explain that. She was almost surprised to learn that her daughter had her own words for the paintings. She watched her daughter walk from one picture to another and say things like, “It’s sad, though, that even on their birthday the man and woman don’t belong in the room.” The mother thought about this. “But see how they’re looking at each other,” she said.

“They belong together. That’s what counts.”

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“Can I play outside?” the daughter asked, bored.

“We talked about this,” the mother said, remembering how they needed to fix the gate after storms had blown in the posts. “We already said no.”

Suddenly the mother could see her daughter walking down their driveway onto the lane joining the main road into town. She heard cars. She could feel the darkness of the space under the cars, the darkness of bruises, and blood, so much blood. She felt euphoric in her refusal.

“No,” she said again. Then she said, “Would you like to use the computer? We could look up something.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything in the world.”

Two clicks and they were there. Anywhere. Click, click.

The mother clicked through radiant pages of blue buildings and white mountains, and it seemed that life was wild and a dream and a blaze; she was wild, she herself was a dream.

She was dizzy under the crash of distant waves and for a moment she was not a mother but an ordinary girl, not even a girl, a child, something yet to be, a spray of atoms.

Less than that. She was just a single atom. Less than that.

Her existence was merely potential. The feeling of being such a trivial part of the universe was like being caught at the eye of a strong wind. Then a sudden nausea hit. The nausea made it difficult to stand or even sit straight, as if she was filling up with air, and the mother put her arms around her daughter and felt how light she was, how she felt like crumpled paper, or a balloon. The lightness of her daughter did not make it any easier. She wanted to call out for her husband. Her husband, she guessed, would be outside. In one of the gardens along the lane a dog barked.

The mother did not move. She thought fiercely of the boxes in the attic. She went through the contents one by one, a mental audit of books, photographs, train tickets, until the nausea began to subside. She felt her daughter 177

put out her hand and reach for the keys of the computer, how she carried on clicking and searching, but just out of view. As if the mother did not know her, or as if her daughter did not want to be known.

I

t was winter and the nights began to come in fast, rushing out of the forest like fire. The mother went to bed earlier than usual, suspended under the duvet in a state that was more intense even than wakefulness, until her husband crept in beside her. From under her cover it was like watching some very small, very urgent animal move across the forest floor; you could only tell where it had been and not where it was. It never occurred to her husband that she was not asleep and so he couldn’t disturb her.

“I heard something,” the mother said one night, sitting up straight. “Would you go and see?”

“Go back to sleep,” the father said. “Go on.”

“It was like something thumping,” the mother said.

“You must have heard it.” But the father hadn’t. The mother tried to describe the sound but in the dark she found her words were inadequate; there was no correlation between the sounds that could be offered as words and the sound that she had heard. Again, no. Her husband had no inclination of there having been any kind of noise.

“I’ll make you a warm drink,” he said, but his eyes were closed and the mother did not want a drink anyway. The noise was still there, distantly, like you would remember a noise years after an event when it was no longer something you could hear but more a thing you could summon, like poetry. She supposed this was how a newly deaf person might still be able to recall the sound of a lover’s voice. In this way she followed the sound to her daughter’s bedroom.

She opened the door, pressed her toes into the carpet, saw the walls and the furniture fill the vacuum of the places they had always been.

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In the darkness the mother ran her hands along the wall where ten years before there had been a door, and windows. There was a ridge where the frame might once have interrupted the smoothness of the brickwork. For the first time the mother could sense its oddness. It was a broken bone under new skin. If it was possible to feel sadness for something as ordinary as a wall, she was feeling it, in her temples and across her forehead, like a fever. Some people would call it a migraine but the mother knew it was more than that. It was the sadness of the whole world. It was the sadness of every room where people didn’t belong.

She sat on the bed, which was empty, but the mother had known this before she looked; she had already rehearsed this moment, the burst behind her rib cage was familiar, old, it was not even a feeling but an instinct, or a damaged kind of bravery. She stood up again to look at the paintings, which did not look like the same pictures that could be seen in the day. She stared at the cold colours. This panic, she thought, this love. This child.

And then abruptly the mother saw her, soaring high above a gabled roof. At first it seemed that the daughter was going to fly directly into, or maybe out of, the frame, but at the last minute she turned and dove as if into water, her legs bent a little at the knee, her body unembarrassed by its fall. The daughter’s legs seemed to be telling her to let go. Each kick into the air took her further away. She rounded a church spire. Trees rose and receded. There were yellow houses, then a whole town. More and more details flooded into the foreground but the daughter kept flying over the town, as if she didn’t want to land. The mother waved in fear. But for a minute she also marvelled at what her daughter could do. Now her daughter torpedoed towards the trees. Now she coasted out over the river. The river below her daughter’s feet was old, it had seen wars, but now it dozed, now it slept.

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The mother went up close to the picture and touched the surface. Her fingers shook as they made contact. They covered first the door of a barn, then a small duck in the foreground. She opened her hands and spread her fingers wide. Nothing seemed to have changed, but there was her daughter. She stepped back and the wider perspective only made it clearer.

L

ater the mother would recall a look on the daughter’s face that she couldn’t place, or perhaps hadn’t quite seen because of the angle of her flight. She would try and explain it to people who would listen, but the mother was now reduced to a language of absence, which made no sense to the people who could still celebrate presence in conventional ways. It was not like a hole had opened up in the world, the mother would say. It was not like that world was any different; everyone still had somewhere to get to, she still had floors to clean, and the gas bill, although she stopped making lasagne. It was a little like birth, the mother said, which she had been afraid of, but survived.

That was the closest the mother would come. She would try to tell her husband, when he was taking down the Gyprock and the 2x4 battens: she would try to tell him how it seemed that in the painting the whole of the sky was flowing through their daughter and everything she knew to be solid was being exchanged, as if the sky was a feeling, as if the sky was life and only their daughter could see exactly what that meant.

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Quoi Faire Darrell Bourque for Goldman Thibodeaux bn. August 5, 1932 Louisiana LaLa accordionist

I keep my stories in a vessel with no name somewhere deep within me, a place to hold threads to Anatole & to Theodule, no blame on how I came to be, or how I am one fold in a mixed history I mostly travel to in song.

I remember Marie Ophelia through AmĂŠdĂŠ & Iry & in the no-end-no-beginning of longing.

I crossed color lines to get to who I am. The way I arrived in the world was neither right nor wrong.

If others want to say whatever they want to say, I give them room to do just that. For me the flame of memory is air & sound & sight & touch, air old as breath pulled from box & lungs, & air as tame & fair & seared as the midwife who saw me whole.

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speaking In tongues

Glossolalia Maja Lukić After Terrance Hayes The mouth caves open — exeunt tongue, a slick red triangle behind a white zipper of teeth, always touching the foreign, the otherness of day, compassed only by a loose imagination, anchored to a body that may or may not have uses for it.

This boy who has no God today grew up in his parents’ church speaking in tongues & kisses uneasily.

A kiss is a breath in reverse, which is actually sort of death — taking back the cold snow of someone’s teeth the interiority of their grimace, the other side of a smile.

Tongue, always hovering on the edge of something neglected or forgotten — a diving board over an empty pool.

This girl who graffitied her native tongue 184

with new vowels & rituals, in the noble service of learning other tongues, until the native slipped off, spastic & then slack on the long street behind her — as if memory is some cold storage overfull with tongues lined up like dead fish & too many thoughts pushed out the back door.

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What I Try Troy Jollimore I try inspiring showers of light.

I try instigating nightmares.

I take a bride from among the Canaanites.

She meets me in the field by the granary at ten and wraps her arms around me, as one might embrace an absurd idea if not absurdity itself.

I try warping light around my body and walking around unseen.

I try living forever, for a little while.

I become an island, then a lizard.

I promulgate stories about the mermaids.

The tourists and their season arrive and depart.

I become a phase of the moon.

I make myself one of the lesser gods.

Sick of not having a name, I send a plague through the outer villages.

I stay inside, folding laundry.

I try to love the unworthy. I can.

I try not to hate myself while I am loving the unworthy. I cannot.

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I try becoming anger. I fly through the window and back out into the night again before anyone, even the family dog can register my existence.

I try lighting a candle that’s already burning over and over. Night falls. I try every word in the language as my name.

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The Pathology of Poetry Heather Altfeld Like a good Jew, the poet pre-grieves the world with a hopelessness some find endearing.

For every honeybee drilling into the purple clover, we listen for the avalanche of combs in the oaks, for every child’s first whoop straight from the valley of the womb we hear their tiny future fists bleating for a third Tuaca at the bar.

Even the comets that seem so reclusive lately are planning our imminent destruction— if not here, there, if not there, somewhere; Vladivostok, maybe, or the particle of land not claimed by anyone but the unnamed fossil of an ant that, if discovered, would clearly explain the beginning of time.

Hear ye, says the poet upon hearing of new love, take a divorce hankie to tuck over your heart.

As a Jew I was schooled in death and pre-death, in the body’s propensity to grow terrible cells; the world was comprised half of rumors, half of sorrow, and half of ashes.

Purses were pouches for poaching coins, cradles were wallets for poaching babies, hearts were pockets for poaching love.

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Because I could not understand the calculus of disease and because I would not pray to a sky that refused to speak back, because my one discernible talent was the lamentation of loss and desire, I became a poet. Sing, sing, sing!

Listen to the thin sweet splinters of shoebox coffins! Sing sing sing! one free dark song with every birth!

Every poem is both crib and cool mausoleum, every stanza sits shiva for all that has been lost every verse a cry for what needs our attention.

So hire me to weep for you, darling; pay me to remind you in the golden light of this morning that the rivers have gone silent this summer, tiptoeing around every bend, ashamed of their sound, lease me to canter off the day you lay crying in a grassy field, paining for touch, baring your sternum to the clouds.

If only I could understand the sound of beginnings, my love, perhaps we could meet tonight beneath the stars.

I hear they streak the sky like accidents on asphalt in the rain.

Carry me outside, love, blindfold my ears to the one-way lullabies I hear in the dark.

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The Earthquakes Kimberly Kruge The dogs know first. They rile the streets, fill the cavern of silence in the farthest barrios and non-places with prediction, not warning, as nothing can be done.

Then the buildings know.

They morph the stiff property that defines their outline and their worth into the properties of an ocean, an ocean not in control of its terror, of its terribleness. This hypothetical ocean doesn’t want to kill again. It wants its hands tied, just like ours. It wants to resemble us and have no providence. When we finally know, we realize that the earth is in flux, that it is shifting its grief. We cannot stand nor use our hands nor our eyes; we can only speak and listen.

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Devour the Tongue beneath the Sea Isabella Bjelkstr and Don’t show, don’t tell just lie there and pretend you’re at the bottom of the sea.

When they ask – don’t tell devour the tongue and pretend.

No sores, only bite marks from the creatures that live beneath the sea where no fish swim.

Far from the ground on the balcony you are not safe here above toxic streets, trembling pieces of clothing.

And so, you dive.

Finally, when the waves wash you ashore you find that they have been calling you all along.

Not from the sea but from the surface.

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Synaptic Mechanisms for Plasticity in the Neocortex M. C. Rush we are the shy genitals of time riding sly orbitals of space making chickens pay for ancient offense singing apocalypso all day long Man vs. the Memory of Nature (some things it’s a shame to see tamed) whithersoever unjust grotesqueries constant unconscious allusions to process or procedure erupting igneous ignorance ubiquitous as lizard ubiquitous as bug my survival apparatus is burdened with a self-obstruct mechanism credulity fatigue involuntary commitment to associative constructions enacting exacting practices bereft of benefit in lieu of impromptu improv in lieu of glee & dreams of love more powerful than any dreams of love 192

of the tyrannical sweetness of the sacred maids with ancillary sympathies and boisterous breasts (astrogenic duffer-fluffers living the phallic fallacy) who enter the caves of hermits dungskull sugarbandits expat from all that (antipathy anticipated by circumspect erections) with bioluminescent milk lewd elegies for gastroliths iridescented candles looking to trade laughter for wisdom intoxicated intonations halitotic revelation of the sacred sins but react badly to provocation (one sound can trip symphony into cacophony) the relief of compulsion when you ask me to calculate rudiments to measure chance and schedule waste with the set of things that exist solely because I’m unaware, don’t know them to cue a cure across acres of acrimony to resurrect ethereal relations, alien alliances 193

to determine if exits exist (you would think so, but) through the sadness of the sacrosanct fools and follies boozing with the muse tapping the quantum ATM (check the tech—is it legit?) for speech and screams imperfectly rational invisible signals constructs of text recycled wrecks measured by marks of seizure abrupt corruption against the silence

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North Westerly Mel Perry A sound calls in the casement.

Latch-rattling, gable-rushing, eave-sneaking.

Unseen in the air it churns the sea to white crests long before waves breach Carreg Rhona.

Blowing the length of fields, twisting its fingers through uncut meadows, braiding hay grasses, caressing the hair of a waiting lover.

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Ineffable Peycho K anev Dear friend, although I’m still stubbornly learning how to catch fish with only a stick and string, I’m proud to declare that, just like some miniature Prometheus, I have learned how to light a fire, and every night I sit by its warmth and think of the infinite cosmos, of this island and you. I saw your brown body between the greenish palm trees last week, it was Tuesday so I will name you John. I hope you will come to me one day and we will sit together under the night hyacinth sky, by the vast ocean, lapping peacefully in silence around this piece of land and I will talk to you about Wittgenstein’s propositions and Plato’s Dialogues but you’ll have to teach me your tongue, which I’m guessing, is beautiful like a pearl in a sack of coals, yes, John, it’s been two years since I was washed ashore here and I had a marvelous time since; time is everything, when you come to me we’ll talk about it a lot, maybe you see it like a giant snake biting it’s own tail, 196

but in my own experience time

is nothing but a repository of language, a part of speech. Self ’s sense of time is the exact feeling when we find ourselves completely alone, hence, the flair for something waning, hence, the perception of demise. But do not feel threatened, my friend. I’m just a modern man and this is my distorted perspective of seeing the world as such, as it is.

Maybe in your eyes I’m some clumsy giant, speaking a dead language, using the wrong pronouns and adverbs, thinking about time as something measurable and achievable, but for you it is something insignificant, like the albatross in the sky. And what do you feel now when you see me using these long sentences making a make a rope? Ah, I sense fear in you, but don’t be alarmed, my friend, because I will use it to tie us together, like a monolithic prosody, like a single stream of consciousness, our multitudinous thoughts will live together like that until some Somali pirate ship find us on the sand, and they will try to understand what kind of creature is that, what is this strange bundle of words.

And they will leave us there to enjoy the eternity and everything afterwards.

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The King of the Ball Friðrik Sólnes Jónsson

I

n the small town of Akureyri in Iceland, the sixties didn’t arrive until we were already halfway into the seventies. What’s more, not much of the revolutionary spirit of the sixties made it through intact. Only some music and hairstyles. My generation’s parents belonged to the old system of farmers and fishermen who moved to the town from the rural areas and still remembered having to use an outhouse or a bedpan and not having electricity. Or so were we told, over and over, through our childhoods.

We were therefore genuinely grateful for all the modern comforts and wouldn’t even think of making a fuss over things like social stratification or the Viet Nam war. People who are grateful like that tend to be quite conservative.

As the truism would have it, people grew up faster back then. Looking at my old class photo from when we graduated from tenth grade, everyone seemed really grown-up. The men looked like proper adults, most in dark brown or black suits, some with sideburns, some even with full beards, even if they were only 16 or 17. The teacher was sitting a little to the left of the group. He had large black-rimmed glasses and looked a lot like Carlos the Jackal.

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At school, agents, spokespersons or delegates from different organizations or companies had full access to students during school hours. These visits were heartily welcomed by teachers and students alike since the normal curriculum was often repetitive and dull. In the space of a single school year our class would be given over to all sorts of delegates and officials on a regular basis. Someone from the Gideons International would hand out copies of the New Testament and say a few words about the benefits of letting Jesus Christ into our lives. A man from the Independence Party warned against the devastating effect on our frail economy if taxes or wages would be raised.

Númi Þorkell from the YMCA hunted for volunteers both for the nearby lakeside boys’ summer camp as well as the mission in Kenya.

The most memorable visit was an emissary from the Good Templars, which was quite a formidable organization in our town. This small and jittery man was around 60 and had a frown on his face like a mouse looking upwards to sniff at something. He played us a short silent movie using the school’s huge projector and every now and then described to us what was happening on the screen in short agitated bursts of speech. The film was Scandinavian, titled “Balkongen,” or, as the man translated it, “The King of the Ball.” In our dialect, the word “ball” wasn’t just used for formal dances but for any type of get-togethers with music and drinks. The film showed a house party in an apartment block with people drinking, playing records and a few dancing in a clunky way. The film seemed to have a lot of dialogue but our narrator waited patiently through those with his hands crossed over his groin. He sprang into motion when a dark haired man entered the frame. “There he is! The King of the Ball!” He tapped the 200

textile projector screen hard with his finger, denting the picture. “Look at him! He’s totally deranged from drink.

You’ll see where that gets you.”

The King of the Ball was a normal looking fellow in a light-colored suit. He had a drink in his hand and smiled a lot but he didn’t participate in any of the dialogues and was mostly seen in the background or in panoramic shots of the party. The short film reached its tragic crescendo during a scene where two women had a heated argument which lead to one of them falling off the balcony. The old Templar guy tapped on the poor woman who was lying on the pavement below. She raised her head slightly to look up towards the balcony and some terrified guests before falling back down lifeless, dramatically succumbing to her injuries. “This is what you get when you consort with the King of the Ball!”

But the King of the Ball hadn’t been on screen in a while and he wasn’t seen again until the guests were all filing out of the building, looking sombre and miserable.

The Templar gave the screen a slightly softer tap this time.

“He must be really happy with himself now, the king.”

Credits rolled.

After a dramatic pause the old man waxed poetic and asked us to think about the hundreds of seeds that would never become flowers because of the King of the Ball and others of his ilk. Then he thanked the teacher, said his goodbyes and disappeared with his two huge reels of film in their metal casings. His message was mostly lost on us.

The film was more confusing than inspiring but I think most of the boys in class that day where left harboring a secret wish to some day become the King of the Ball.

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T

he years after I finished the tenth grade went by quickly. I started going out to sea with my father who was the captain on a fishing trawler. I had been going every now and then during summers since I was ten, more to spend time with my father than to do work, but the crew were quick to find uses for me so I mostly ran around with the ship’s dog, Lárpera, sharpened knives, helped mend the nets, or delivered messages. Spending time with my father was also nice. He was almost always out at sea and when he came home the atmosphere was tense and he mostly wanted to be left alone in his study.

The first time he was home at Christmas I was already thirteen and it felt strange to see someone else sitting in my mother’s chair.

After the tenth grade I was out at sea so much I missed out on countless parties, camping trips and friends’ weddings.

I also missed out on the not-yet-so-famous Kinks playing in our local movie theater, and Led Zeppelin, playing in our giant handball arena at the peak of their career. It was perhaps no big surprise then that the King of the Ball loomed large in my thoughts during this time.

A chance presented itself when the crew was in the small harbor city of Hull with a few days shore leave.

The plan was to leave the old trawler to be scrapped and then sail home on a brand new one. My father was busy with moving equipment between the two trawlers and the rest of the crew would visit prostitutes and get anchors tattooed on their forearms marking the occasion, with “Hull 1974” inscribed beneath. The first thing I did was to get on the next train to London. At Piccadilly Circus I walked straight into Aquascutum, which sold high quality clothes for gentlemen, and proceeded to dress myself up like a king. I bought a suit and an overcoat and some 202

dress shirts, shoes, leather gloves, a belt and a scarf. It cost around two months’ wages but I didn’t care. I was always working and I never had a chance to spend anything. A week later we were docking again back home. Akureyri had never seemed smaller and the mountains around it had never seemed bigger and more imposing. Seeing the dockworkers and the old cars parked nearby made me feel like I had just traveled back in time.

As I walked back home over the gravel lot with the taxis I could see posters advertising a ball that very evening, with a band playing and everything. This was my chance. I got dressed in my new clothes and drove to the ball. I sat in my car for a while close to the venue, our handball arena, and listened to the national radio. Sailors’ Requests was on, mostly playing upbeat accordion music. I took swigs from a small vodka bottle and smoked Royale cigarettes. I had grown quite tall and the roof of my Volkswagen beetle flattened the top of my Afro hairdo. When I’d polished off the vodka I got out and walked towards the arena.

It was the time of year which our poet Halldór Laxness had described as the time between hay and grass, when winter was supposed to be over but spring was not in sight, and men and animals used to drop like flies. This was in the olden days, which in Iceland lasted until WWII, when the blessed war made everyone rich and modern.

The air was cold and crisp and after six weeks of diesel fumes I felt I could smell the oxygen in the air. The cold didn’t come with the wind but rather seemed to radiate from the ground and the yellow grass was frozen so it made a soft creaking sound when you walked on it.

There was already a line outside the venue. Most of the people were dressed up but a few of the men seemed to have just headed there straight after work. They looked 203

like the dockworkers I’d seen earlier—in dirty and worn woolen sweaters with sixpence caps and specks of coarse snuff tobacco around their noses and mouths—and they made me feel the sort of confidence that’s born out of sheer contempt for one’s fellow man. I was also drunk and looking like a goddamned prince. I walked past the line and went straight inside. I didn’t even stop to pay for a ticket. I was the King of the Ball.

Inside I didn’t even take off my coat or my gloves. I’d felt certain haughtiness that one is bound to feel when one has taken in the streets and carpeted pub floors of London as well as this spectacle in the same week. The Rooftops were playing Beatles covers mixed with their own Beatles knock-offs and the guys would push each other onto groups of girls. Courting at its finest. It worked every time. I was amused like a parent is amused, like royalty are amused.

The after party was at Gomba’s house, a huge threestory funkis house with an observatory on top. Gomba was very beautiful, plump with short blond hair in the style of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. All the girls had that hairstyle in Akureyri in ‘74. I still had my coat on but now at least my gloves were in my pocket. We were talking and smoking. Mostly smoking. I had a burning sensation in my eyes and a shitty taste in my mouth so I tried to drink red wine in big swigs to rinse it out. We talked for a long time and sometimes I would go refill my glass in the kitchen and sometimes she’d have to go to the bathroom or somewhere but we would always come back to the same spot on top of the stairs overlooking the living room.

Her father was a senator and a banker and the house was filled with all sorts of tokens of wealth. Persian rugs and oil paintings. The keen eye could also have detected some indications of the unhealthy relationship between 204

the public and private sectors in our town. Gomba’s father was regularly given all sorts of trophies or ornaments from the town’s biggest businesses, for his birthday or wedding.

Their house had a sauna in the basement, which was quite unheard of. Then there were the souvenirs. Nobody traveled abroad during these years and if you did you went no further than Copenhagen or the harbor cities in Britain and Germany, like Hull, Grimsby, Hamburg, or Cuxhaven. These people had holy water in a bottle from a trip to Jerusalem, and a small roulette trinket from Monaco. Apparently the casinos sent a limo after the old man whenever he was in town on account of his gambling enthusiasm.

Gomba and I were running out of things to say and I kept thinking about the right moment to kiss her. Time wasn’t on my side. I was sobering up and pale blue daylight was already streaming through the window. There was a real-life hippie sitting on the sofa with long hair, an open shirt exposing chest hair and lots of jewelry made from wooden beads and turquoise. He was trying to smoke hashish from a pipe while five or six people looked on in amazement. I had never seen anyone smoke hashish before and I had serious doubts regarding whether it had ever reached our town to begin with. There were news stories about the police busting some minor attempt at smuggling or some teenagers carrying small amounts. It was always revealed that the substance was licorice, incense, and dirt. Depressing. But here was the opportunity to make a move on Gomba as the hippie was smoking his hashish and describing the effects to the onlookers with slow wavy hand gestures. We were turned in the same direction and I put my arm around her waist. She looked at me and smiled and then turned her head back towards the living room.

We stood like that for a while. Then she turned around 205

and faced me and put a hand on my shoulder. Our faces were almost together, her eyes turned down towards my lips. Then we heard a chant. First one or two voices and then everyone in the sofa calling loudly towards us “Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!” Even her friends were in on it, making their hands into bugles so they would be louder.

Gomba disentangled herself, laughed and made some dismissive gesture. I tried to laugh too. Gomba went down the stairs and joined her friends and everyone, including her, thought this little prank had been absolutely hilarious.

I stayed on for a while but Gomba didn’t come back to talk to me. I was developing a headache. I looked at myself in a mirror in a corridor. I looked like shit, with a flushed puffy face and bloodshot eyes. I felt silly in the nice clothes now. I waved goodbye to the small crowd in the living room and hurried out.

A

year later I started college in Reykjavík and I heard Gomba had moved to New York. Three years later I met my wife, finished my degree and we moved to Lund in Sweden. I would often think about Gomba in the years after and what could have been. Even that felt like profound betrayal, deeper than fantasizing about another woman, although that was an important component. It was fantasizing about another family, other children and other in-laws, a whole different set of experiences.

I often wondered who had started that chant. It didn’t really matter but I always suspected that hippie. It therefore gave me great pleasure some thirty years after the incident when I saw his face on the front of a newspaper. He was the owner and manager of a bed and breakfast in an even smaller town than Akureyri and was arrested for having installed small cameras in the showers and bathrooms of 206

his establishment. Apparently some tourist women noticed a small lens somewhere between the panels in the ceiling.

His utter disgrace gave me satisfaction, as well as the fact that the years hadn’t treated him very well: he’d turned into a fat bastard.

Shortly after we settled in Lund I was at a café with an outside terrace. A sign on the door read “Balkongen.”

Then it hit me. Balkongen meant balcony, not the King of the Ball.

I thought of Gomba and felt cheated, then guilty, then sad.

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“More fun than scissored silhouettes” Review of Hula Hooping by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming Chameleon Press, 2015.

Jason S. Polley

T

o review, to “examine or assess (something) formally with the possibility or intention of instituting change if necessary,” so says a suddenly Derridean Google Search. Actually—and, actually seems to mark me as an actual Hongkonger given the adverb’s actual preponderance in the everyday lexicon, a commonality Hong Kong actually shares with eighties New York, if Baker’s excellent The Mezzanine is anything to actually go by—there are no substantial “change[s]” I’d like necessarily to “institut[e],” at all, at all, to Tammy Ho’s Hula Hooping.

Just one arguable, insubstantial, typo—if we can even trust the indication “typo” in this post-structural age.

The final line of “A river on its way” reads: “of primitive earth, pealed bare.” Might the poet mean peeled? The same “peeled” that shows up in the following ever-sexified lines in the mathematical middle of “Scientific love”: “Or the beach—the beach / where you peeled me a banana, a peach.” In his review of the collection Desde Hong Kong: 208

Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz, where “A river on its way” previously appears in print, Henry Leung not only forgives but also validates the use of pealing: “The homophone there (I’m inclined not to read it as a typo) gives us the sense of a bell pealing: layers of sound contracting inward in order to expand outward, which resonates deeply with the poem’s intimations of motherhood. Peeling, but also pealing.”

Two other points substantiate the homophone, of pealing for peeling. “A river on its way” is located in the opening section of Hula Hooping, which is titled “Family Affairs.” Furthermore, in an earlier draft of the poem, which I was privileged to “examine or assess … [in]formally with the possibility [and] intention of instituting change [where] necessary” the final line reads “of primitive earth, peeled bare.” The move from “peeled” to “pealed” appears to have been consciously/playfully/indicatively instituted by the poet herself.

But why even (re)address the presence of the homophone in this multiply-published poem? Well, because the speaker specifically asks her listeners to do so. The final section of the collection, tellingly titled “Envoi,” consists of almost six pages of epigrammatic proclamations somewhat reminiscent of the “Findings” pieces that close Harper’s, albeit Tammy Ho’s affirmations are personal, not peculiar, candid, not concocted, sensitive, not sneering. Halfway couched in the longest of her near-140 frank sentence-long insightful confessions is the request that we correct her English: “I don’t like the buzzing sound of an iPhone in my presence, untidy sugar cubes in a broad-brimmed cup, ink stains on leather jackets, not having my English corrected when I make mistakes, poems that are titled ‘Untitled,’ the texture of licorice, and the taste of non-alcoholic beer.”

Rather than produce a trove of errors to be uncovered, however, Tammy Ho publishes a text replete with 209

sophisticated English usages to be underlined and shared.

My personal favourites from “Envoi” alone are: “I want to write about Hong Kong like Guy Maddin wrote about Winnipeg but before I do that I have to love my city more”; “I question authority constantly, secretly, timidly”; “My passport photos are ugly but the urgency of having them taken means that one can’t be too fussy”; “I ask myself, ‘How much of history is lost to illegible glances?’”; “I can be quite selfish and I don’t want to elaborate on that”; “I think it’s arrogant of me to try to convert people with friendliness”; “I think ‘love’ said in a certain way can be chillingly passive-aggressive”; “Twice I was moved to kiss the pages of a book I was reading”; “I remain scornful of those who use ‘LOL’”; “I imagine it’s more cinematic to part with someone at a snow-covered train station than a provincial airport”; and “If I am to write a book in my senile days it will be The History of the Clock.”

The last two selections return me to earlier parts of the collection, which contains 64 poems before the “Envoi.”

“To see the world” is a cynical, serious, private piece that channels Blake’s universal cry, “A Robin Red Breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage,” to the particulars of a speaker who wants but “five minutes” on “a snowcovered train station,” not “a provincial airport”—to “still the world / in an eternity of nanoseconds” by holding her partner’s “hand amidst this flock of / chance passengers and passing chances.” The best part in this poem about the refusal to reconcile ostensible worldliness with what Ginsberg would still call Moloch’s “almighty heterosexual dollar” is this: “On a remote village road, barefoot children grow or wane, / while daffodils beg for rain” (62).

Tammy Ho’s exploration—or exegesis, rather—of time runs through Hula Hooping. We see it, feel it, live it, time, time, time, moving or indexed, tick-tocking or st(r)uck, in entries that include “Minute,” “A brief meal,” “Written 210

in snow,” “Deceiving the world,” “The argument,” “A moment at a housewarming party,” and “Lovers’ ups and downs (in six parts).”

Another way that we the made-ever-more-curious-andcaring readers see and feel and live Tammy Ho’s first book is through identification and empathy. We laugh and lament and cheer too, even if only internally (and Ho, after all, not unlike Dickinson, stresses the seriousness of interiority), when the father purchases a young Tammy and her younger twin sisters refreshments at the conclusion of “His t-shirts.” The gift that Tammy Ho bestows upon her readers is what we might clumsily call the uplifting— ennobling even—marriage of the manifold. She seamlessly juxtaposes or conflates outwardly contradictory feelings and passions. When we (re)read “Official causes of death in a Chinese prison” (irrespective of the envoi “I feel sad about the conflict between Hongkongers and Mainland Chinese;” Ho’s sympathy and sensitivity are never, even for a “nanosecond,” in question) it is the deadpan humour that so vociferously horrifies and angers and enlists us.

And at the same time as she personally identifies with these “cage[d]” and slayed “Red Robins,” she attends to her (privileged) political dissociation from them: she’s a Hongkonger, not a mainland Chinese, an assertion and distinction that is in itself an “[un]timid” and “[un-]secret” “question[ing]” of the Politburo’s ideological “authority.”

I’d like to end this poetry review with another of Tammy Ho’s envoi. Here is an animadverse thought that we must all share in one way or another, a beloved and abhorred thought each of us simultaneously cleaves to and cleaves from, a thought we each battle to recollect just as much as we fight to overlook: “I wish I didn’t occasionally think my grandfather walked too slowly on his crooked wooden cane.”

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Contributors Darrell Bourque was Louisiana State’s poet laureate from 2007 to 2011. He has five volumes of poetry including The Blue Boat (2004), Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie (2014) and “if you abandon me, comment je vas faire”: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook (2015).

Ian C. Smith’s work has appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, New Contrast, Poetry Salzburg Review, Rabbit Journal, The Stony Thursday Book, TwoThirds North, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).

Jeffrey Alfier won the 2014 Kithara Book Prize for his poetry collection, Idyll for a Vanishing River. He is also author of The Wolf Yearling and The Storm Petrel – Ireland Poems. His work has appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Louisiana Review.

Rowan Johnson holds a doctorate from the University of Tennessee. His work has been published in numerous magazines and the Writers’ Abroad Foreign Encounters Anthology. He has also written travel articles for The Complete Woman and SEOUL Magazine.

Robyn Bolam is a prize-winning poet and a librettist. Her poetry collections, published by Bloodaxe, are The Peepshow Girl (1989), Raiding the Borders (1996), and New Wings: poems 1977–2007 (2007), which was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. www.robynbolam.com Gary Allen is an award-winning Irish poet with thirteen published collections, the most recent, Mexico. Jackson’s Corner is forthcoming. Poems published widely in Ambit, Australian Book Review, Edinburgh Review, London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, etc.

Srđan Šušnica, cultural worker from Banja Luka. He studies Bosnian culture and heritage, but he is also an activist who struggles against historical amnesia and revisionism, nationalism, and fascism.

Domenic Scopa is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2014 recipient of the Robert K. Johnson Poetry Prize and Garvin Tate Merit Scholarship.

His work has been featured in Texas Poetry Review, Poetry Quarterly, Visions International, Poetry Pacific, and others.

Robert Pope’s work appears in The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review etc. An essay appeared in Pushcart Prize XIII. He has a novel, Jack’s Universe, and a collection of stories, Private Acts.

Troy Jollimore’s collection Syllabus of Errors was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2015. His other books of poetry are Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 2006, and At Lake Scugog (2011). He is also the author of two books of philosophy, Love’s Vision and On Loyalty.

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash (2012) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 19822013. In 2015 he was the featured poet at Atticus Review and Contemporary American Voices, with other poems in many magazines.

Heather Altfeld’s first book, The Disappearing Theatre, won the 2015 Poets at Work Prize. She has also won the 2015 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Liesl Nunns has a doctorate in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford. She co-edits a literary journal, Headland. Her work appears in Southerly, Hawai’ i Review, Print-Oriented Bastards, etc.

Tim Robbins has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1978.

His poems have also appeared in Three New Poets, Long Shot, The James White Review, Evergreen Chronicles, and others.

Andy Smart’s work has appeared in Camel Saloon, Green Fuse, and is forthcoming in the anthology Show Me All Your Scars from In Fact Books.

Tom Vowler is an award-winning writer of What Lies Within and That Dark Remembered Day. His collection, The Method, won the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize in 2011. He is editor of Short Fiction.

Kimberly Kruge is a poet and translator based in Mexico. Her recent publications include The Briar Cliff Review and Riot of Perfume.

Jason Namey is an MFA student at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. His work appears or is forthcoming in fields, El Portal and After the Pause.

Alexandra Larsson Jacobson is a Swedish artist whose photography and installations explore how we relate to concepts of reality and fiction. She is interested in the unspoken and hidden aspects of people and places.

Carl Boon lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. Recent or forthcoming poems appear in Posit, The Tulane Review, The Blue Bonnet Review, Badlands, and many other magazines.

Sybil Baker’s most recent novel is Into This World. “The Germans are Coming” is part of a collection of personal essays on refugees, the legacies of American South, and wandering, which is forthcoming in fall 2016 from C&R Press.

Valentina Cano’s works have appeared in numerous publications and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web. Her debut novel is The Rose Master.

Kari Wergeland has published in Badlands, Crannóg, New Millennium Writings. She also wrote a children’s book review column for The Seattle Times, which ran monthly for 11 years.

Milton Montague first fell in love with poetry at 85. Now at 90 plus, 50 of his poems have been published, in thirteen different magazines.

Maja Lukić’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Prelude, Salamander, The South Carolina Review, Canary, Posit, DIALOGIST, Chiron Review, and other journals. See majalukic.com. Twitter: @majalukic113 Derek Sugamosto is a writer/editor in the Metro Detroit area of Michigan.

He has published in Greatest Lakes Review, Orange Coast Review, Dogwood, Sheepshead Review, Tulane Review, Wisconsin Review and apt.

Tom Bradstreet is a graduate student in English Literature at Stockholm University with a particular interest in postcolonial ecocriticism, objectoriented theory, and environmental reading practices in the era of climate change. Åsa Samuelsson is a Master student in English literature who was raised on the west coast of Sweden. Horror fiction is one of her great passions in life.

George Neary graduated from York St John University and released his first novel, Days of Debauchery, in 2014. He now lives in Stockholm where he teaches and is working on a second novel and scriptwriting.

Mel Perry’s poetry is inspired by the natural world and specific built environment. She was the pioneer travelling poet in the first exchange organised by the Wales Ireland Spoken Word and Poetry Alliance (WISPA) in 2014.

Lucy Durneen’s work has appeared in many UK and International magazines.

She has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Manchester Fiction Prize, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. “Time Is River ...” first appeared in the Galley Beggar Press Singles Club http://www. galleybeggar.co.uk.

Isabella Bjelkstrand is studying at Stockholm University to become a High School teacher of English and Spanish.

M. C. Rush currently lives in upstate New York and has most recently published poems in Broad River Review, Whiskey Island, The Bicycle Review, Open Road Review and 300 Days of Sun. Peycho Kanev has four poetry collections and two chapbooks. He has won several European awards for his poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Hawaii Review, Sheepshead ReviewThe Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review and many others.

Friðrik Sólnes Jónsson is a master electrician and a Master of English literature, a parent, a sibling, a spouse, a philanthropist, a pious open-minded nihilist. Soon, God willing, he will be thirty-six years old.

Brandon Straus is an American artist whose paintings create an open-ended dialogue about the projection of one’s self through object and personal effects, He explores the relationships between art and object fetishism.

Walter Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and educator. He is the author of seven books including Imagination: The Art of W. Jack Savage (wjacksavage. com).

Jason S Polley is an associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.

His creative work includes the books Refrain (2010) and Cemetery Miss You (2011).

Meho Mahmutović practices law in Bosnia and edits www.astronaut.ba.