Kathleen Driskell | Poetry
And perhaps someday my own ashes
will be scattered through the meadows
of tickseed, carrot weed, and drooping dog
hobble, Kentucky wildflowers that I love.
A speck of me might be caught in the wind
and dropped like a flea into the cupped hand
of a bellflower, falling upon a beetle that has slipped
away and has fallen asleep within that blossom.
When later the beetle is eaten by the finch
I might be swooped through the blue air of summer,
riding as high as any of the orthodox resurrected.
Poet’s Note
"Resurrection" is fromThe Vine Temple, my chapbook forthcoming from Carnegie
Mellon University Press in February 2023. To my surprise, I’ve come to primarily
think of myself as a poet of place, though my place isn’t a region; rather my
place is within the circumference of a few miles of my home that I’ve made with
my family in an old country church built before the American Civil War and which
sets next to a humble graveyard. What I’ve learned is that this place stirs my
imagination so completely with ideas of faith, death, the supernatural, nature,
fairness, memory, and history that I can write about whatever I’d like even
while staying within what I suppose many would consider tight boundaries.And perhaps someday my own ashes
will be scattered through the meadows
of tickseed, carrot weed, and drooping dog
hobble, Kentucky wildflowers that I love.
A speck of me might be caught in the wind
and dropped like a flea into the cupped hand
of a bellflower, falling upon a beetle that has slipped
away and has fallen asleep within that blossom.
When later the beetle is eaten by the finch
I might be swooped through the blue air of summer,
riding as high as any of the orthodox resurrected.
Poet’s Note
"Resurrection" is fromThe Vine Temple, my chapbook forthcoming from Carnegie
Mellon University Press in February 2023. To my surprise, I’ve come to primarily
think of myself as a poet of place, though my place isn’t a region; rather my
place is within the circumference of a few miles of my home that I’ve made with
my family in an old country church built before the American Civil War and which
sets next to a humble graveyard. What I’ve learned is that this place stirs my
imagination so completely with ideas of faith, death, the supernatural, nature,
fairness, memory, and history that I can write about whatever I’d like even
while staying within what I suppose many would consider tight boundaries.Kathleen Driskell | Poetry
Though used interchangeably, as with most
synonyms there is a denotative
as well as a connotative difference
between a graveyard and a cemetery.
A graveyard rests beside a church: one
wanders from the pews and pulpit to visit
the still members of his congregation.
But one usually enters a cemetery
under a vine-covered arch, or sometimes
between pillars of brick and mortar
with carriage lights atop each.
There are gardens and religious
monuments, statues of saints, perhaps
a loose philosopher behind an old cedar,
and reflecting pools and winding paths
to be walked while introspecting.
Headstones mark the graves
of those laid to rest next to another with
whom they’ve likely never had a conversation,
much less an argument about Jesus,
and never will henceforth. Heaven.
Poet’s Note
"Synonyms" is fromThe Vine Temple, my chapbook forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon
University Press in February 2023. To my surprise, I’ve come to primarily think
of myself as a poet of place, though my place isn’t a region; rather my place is
within the circumference of a few miles of my home that I’ve made with my family
in an old country church built before the American Civil War and which sets next
to a humble graveyard. What I’ve learned is that this place stirs my imagination
so completely with ideas of faith, death, the supernatural, nature, fairness,
memory, and history that I can write about whatever I’d like even while staying
within what I suppose many would consider tight boundaries.Though used interchangeably, as with most
synonyms there is a denotative
as well as a connotative difference
between a graveyard and a cemetery.
A graveyard rests beside a church: one
wanders from the pews and pulpit to visit
the still members of his congregation.
But one usually enters a cemetery
under a vine-covered arch, or sometimes
between pillars of brick and mortar
with carriage lights atop each.
There are gardens and religious
monuments, statues of saints, perhaps
a loose philosopher behind an old cedar,
and reflecting pools and winding paths
to be walked while introspecting.
Headstones mark the graves
of those laid to rest next to another with
whom they’ve likely never had a conversation,
much less an argument about Jesus,
and never will henceforth. Heaven.
Poet’s Note
"Synonyms" is fromThe Vine Temple, my chapbook forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon
University Press in February 2023. To my surprise, I’ve come to primarily think
of myself as a poet of place, though my place isn’t a region; rather my place is
within the circumference of a few miles of my home that I’ve made with my family
in an old country church built before the American Civil War and which sets next
to a humble graveyard. What I’ve learned is that this place stirs my imagination
so completely with ideas of faith, death, the supernatural, nature, fairness,
memory, and history that I can write about whatever I’d like even while staying
within what I suppose many would consider tight boundaries.Emily Meffert | Short Story
1. They Would Have to Build a Town
They would have to build a town, stat. Bill Bird watched a stroke of sand drift
from his fingers. Gulls squalled over the barren beach. Marram grass,
salt-crusted and limp with humidity, nodded in the hot wind like barflies on
Sunday morning.
Besides Oswaldo Fudge, Bill hadn’t seen another person on the island. Bill hated
Oswaldo. He tried to remember if he had actually hated someone before. Maybe
when he was a kid. He wished Oswaldo nothing but the worst. Like, if they didn’t
need to build a town here he would absolutely take that dinghy back to the coast
and leave Oswaldo marooned forever like they did in stories. He’d do that in a
heartbeat.
They’d driven as far east as they could go and then they’d had to drive back to
Holly Ridge to lift a dinghy off of one of the town’s twenty-seven residents.
Strapping a dinghy to the roof of Oswaldo’s Roadmaster had been a comedy of
errors. And then they’d driven as far east as they could go, again.
Oswaldo probably slept with his mother. He was just so anxious to be tenured. He
was just unequivocally certain that they could trust the coastal map they’d
unearthed from the viscera of the University library. They’d never even heard of
the cartographers!
Grateful that none of their colleagues were there to see it, they’d managed to
steer the little boat to the last piece of land between their bootsoles and
Casablanca. That’s where they found nobody and, for that reason, would have to
build a town. Like, stat. Which made Bill wonder, how did one go about doing
that? Building a town?
It seemed like a lot of work.
For a moment, it had been like a dream. There was talk of Bill being appointed
as an Assistant Professor. Which was big. He was still riding the high of his
success when he received a letter from some Hugh Francis and some Nikki Argus,
who were threatening litigation. Why? Because Bill’s map unquestionably
plagiarized the map they—Francis and Argus—had published several years earlier.
Unquestionably how? Drive to Fraus, their letter instructed, and see what you
find there. (Could Bill carefully repair the envelope and Return to Sender?)
Hence the dinghy and hence Oswaldo Fudge pacing desolate beach like true asshole
and hence sad sand fleeting through Bill’s fingers. Oh no, oh no, says Oswaldo,
we’re really fucked now, we should have taken the extra month, driven the extra
miles, boo hoo, now we are really truly fucked, bla bla bla, what are we going
to do?
What they did was: tactfully, thoroughly deplete their reserves of influence to
steer the University, in partnership with the United States Navy, to just the
most perfect island where the United States Navy, in partnership with the
University, could establish a permanent home for their guided missile
development program well outside of the public eye and even throw up a bridge
and a handful of human-made structures in the process, on which Bill Bird and
Oswaldo Fudge might hang a sign or two declaring the town’s irreplicable name as
it had always, unmistakably been: Fraus. And then some Hue Franwhatever and some
Nick Argyle, amateur mapmakers whose names would be—already had been!—lost to
the sands of time, could suck Bill’s big fat—
2. The Operation Concluded
The Operation concluded in 1948; the launch pads were repurposed as a motel
patio and a roller rink. The first guests—newly-weds and families from
Wilmington to Winston-Salem—buried the lean years behind them in nightly rounds
of Sidecars and shrimp cocktails and fruit cocktails and Singapore Slings. Bill
moved his twin sister into a simple but expansive cottage on the head of the
island, where the Intracoastal Waterway touched the Atlantic Ocean and
glittered.
Matilda Bird was kookie. She was curious. Never felt home anywhere, didn’t want
a husband, floated on the fringes. Reborn in those untamed maritime forests and
long blank stretches of beach. Immediately she began. She began without an
outcome in mind. She would transform her home into something that, decades
later, would become a kind of unconventional art museum. Under Matilda’s brush
the clapboards became a mosaic. Ingrid Bergman greeted the sea—a true cubist
icon. She didn’t even realize cubism was passé. She wouldn’t have even cared if
someone had told her that cubism was passé. She painted four toilets to resemble
Victorian parlor chairs and arranged them around her kitchen table. She put fake
telephones on the wall beside the real telephone, assembled false appliances and
interspersed them with their functional counterparts. Visitors—there were
some—had trouble finding where to wash their hands or turn on a light. Besides
guarding access to secret knowledge, Matilda liked nothing so much as feeling
disoriented in places that had become too familiar. Her home offered a
continuous reminder that anything could be anything else.
On her seventieth birthday Matilda sold her cottage to the City of Fraus and
moved to Raleigh to live with her brother. She would never return to the coast.
She began taking trips to the western part of the state, admiring the blue
ridges and telling tourists that she had hiked there from Maine. Had they heard
of the Appalachian Trail? She liked people’s faces, their big eyes, twining them
around her finger.
3. He Wasn’t Laughing
He wasn’t laughing. Damn. She regretted saying it and scrutinized the buttons on
her Sony Walkman for seven whole dings. On the eighth floor they paused at the
crazy lady’s apartment. She didn’t read the headlines on the News & Observer; he
didn’t make loud squeaking sounds with his Doc Martens to drive Crazy Lady’s dog
into a fit of primordial rage. No paper today, no Docs. No dice. Just two pairs
of shoes on Crazy Lady’s Dachsund-shaped welcome mat: some old hiking boots with
red laces and a couple of crummy Nikes. Green swooshes. They stood there
looking. They could take them, she thought.
“We could take them,” he said.
In his apartment she opened a beer and kicked off her heels. He tossed his
jacket on the floor. The sky pouted in the windows and he fumbled with the
lampswitch until the room’s fuzzy shapes turned hard. She liked him in a suit.
Did she feel guilty about that? She did not feel guilty about that. Her position
was, thinking about sex during a funeral wasn’t less moral than trying to
imagine how some distant relation had taken their coffee or influenced waste
management legislation or how she might’ve felt if she’d met them in springtime
or heard them play that set at Sloppy Lager back in the good old days. In the
midst of death, life? Right? And sex, being one of the good things in life, was
an eminently acceptable place for one’s mind to wander during their partner’s
step-uncle’s funeral, AKA celebration of life, right? Sure. Sure it was. The
main thing, as a general principle, was to cover your losses. And if you’d
already lost, say, anything, the main thing was to make something or take
something to plug up the holes when they gaped.
“What do we do now?” She said.
He shrugged. “We can’t wear them around.” He was loosening the lip of his
oxford.
“Why did we take them?”
“We?”
“We both took them.” Hadn’t they? The oxford popped. He wiggled his toes in taco
patterned socks.
“Well, we can’t wear them around.” He picked up one of the Nikes and curled his
toes and in they went. “A little big,” he said, fingering the space behind his
heel. “Not bad, though.”
“Let’s go away for a minute,” she said. She’d finished her beer fast and she
felt glitter in the roots of her hair. “You’ve already called out for the rest
of the week. It’d be good for you to get away.”
4. The Coast was Sleepy
The coast was sleepy. Crossing the Sound felt like crossing into Narnia or
something. Just something totally separate. He used to have this dream where
he’d run into his parents’ bedroom and into their office and into their closet
and then he’d slip between the checkered button-downs and behind them he’d enter
the kitchen of this fish sandwich joint with yellow Slippery Floor signs and
through the swinging doors a renaissance gallery with gold accents and oil
paintings and then he’d rush to the room’s far edge and out onto the balcony
where he’d kneel on a velvet banquette to overlook the universe, like a
periscope extending out of the moon with stars scattered in the blank dark on
every side of him.
He wondered why “sound” meant both noise and water. Which word came first? Noise
seemed more fundamental than water, because the Big Bang had to have been pretty
loud, but then wouldn’t you have to have humans to perceive vibrations in order
for there to be sound sound, like noise? So probably water came first. Janice
was saying something.
“Carl? Hey? Hello? Can you please do something about this static.” Janice had
been smacking the tuner like the captain of a quick recall team and they’d
skidded in and out of static since at least Holly Ridge. Carl liked the
ambiguity, though. He pressed the power button and rolled down their windows.
“We’re just about here.”
The island reminded him of an appendix—something that had had a purpose, he
guessed, at some point, and then had just kind of hung around, taking up space.
He imagined it rusting comprehensively, becoming unmoored, becoming smaller and
smaller as it floated toward the rising sun. Their cottage was cozy and Janice
was surprised by how well the boots fit, like a blind date that clicks despite
the odds. Dirt flaked from the laces as she spun red loops into knots. She
hopped-skipped around the kitchen doing these little poses. God, he loved
Janice. Her blunt bangs and her black bob and the way she flicked her fingers
beneath the tap water to gauge its temperature and the way she flicked her
tongue around a glass’s circumfrence before taking a sip. She made a face. He
took the glass from her hand and set it on the linoleum countertop. He was
tugging her shirt tail out from her jeans when somebody knocked.
“Goddammit,” she said.
He squeezed, pressing his thumbs into her tummy. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”
5. At the Door He Hesitated
At the door he hesitated. He looked at her as though for confirmation that he
was doing this right. They knocked again. He twisted the knob.
The woman wore an orange t-shirt embroidered with a pair of flip flops. Life is
Good, its sun-colored letters insisted. She looked overbaked, as though emerging
from some equatorial summer, though it was May and domestic as Pepsi around
here. Her blonde ponytail spurted from a scrunchie that crowned her like a
wreath. She couldn’t have been much older than her, Janice thought. But there
were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.
“I lost my son. Have you seen him?”
“Uh,” Carl started. “We just got here. We. We haven’t seen him.”
The woman’s eyes moved between the people in the doorway. She flattened her palm
on the air beside her breast. “He’s this tall. Looks just like me.”
He shook his head. “We haven’t seen, uh.”
The woman’s throat bobbed. Time dilated and loudly pulsed.
“I’m Amber,” she said. “Like the color.” She dangled her hand like something
that might be slapped away.
Carl shook it. “Carl.”
Janice shook it. “Melanie.”
Carl looked at her. Janice picked at a piece of lint on her sleeve.
“We could get your number,” said Carl. “You know, in case.” He walked into the
kitchen and started opening drawers.
Amber stepped inside. She smelled like smoke. Janice wondered if she should act
hospitable. If Carl didn’t say something in the next fifteen seconds she would
say—what? Something. One mississippi. Two. She would say something in twenty
seconds. One mississippi.
Carl ripped a sheet out of the yellow pages. He brought Amber a pen. Don’t
forget your area code, he said.
Amber scribbled something in the margin.
“Good luck with, um, everything.”
Then she left.
Carl locked the door and looked at Janice. He gave her his
incredulous-but-amused face. “Um, what?”
Janice rolled her eyes. “What difference does it make?” Because, honestly, what
difference did it make?
“I don’t get you sometimes.”
“What’s there to get? I did something you didn’t expect. I didn’t expect it. But
there must have been a reason, because I did it.”
6. Morning
They went to the grill. They sat at the bar, ate fried eggs and onion rings.
Autographed photos of fish and men littered the wall opposite them. Janice was
studying Dale Gooch holding a 113-pound Wahoo in July of 1951 when the man next
to her pointed his fork at the picture below it and swallowed whatever he’d been
chewing and said “that’s my daddy there.” He looked at Janice like an old
friend. “He caught that Spanish Mackerel the summer my baby brother was born, if
you can believe it. Seven point one pounds, fought like hell.”
Carl leaned in. “The fish or your brother?” He smelled like Speed Stick.
“Uh huh,” said the man. Janice poked at the bulging yolk on her plate.
“You know, it’s funny—”
Bells tinkled behind them. The man perked up and looked over his shoulder.
“That’s a real sad thing,” he said, as though continuing a conversation that
he’d set down elsewhere. He nodded toward the woman approaching the host stand.
“Lost her daughter yesterday. Poof.”
Janice glanced at the deeply tanned woman with a straw-colored ponytail and
frowned. Carl looked concerned.
“Anyhow, you know kids. Always some mischief.” The man was pushing a heap of
hash browns around the rim of his plate. “I’m sure she’ll turn up after she’s
got her kicks.”
●After breakfast they became acquainted with all of the souvenirs that could be
shaped like a starfish. Treasure Island Gift Shoppe sold muted pastel t-shirts,
Reagan-Bush ‘84 koozies, packets of Big League Chew that expired in 1981. Janice
maintained that the sea urchin charm was the most compelling, though Carl liked
the shark-wearing-a-coconut-bra charm best. In the streets of Delhi they’d
touched at least a thousand trinkets, debating the aesthetic merits of a string
of mala beads or a figurine depicting Vishnu on a bed of snakes. She’d laughed
until mango lassi came out of her nose while he explained how this thin, phallic
buddha statue was a replica of those 108 that Siddhartha himself had
commissioned, which he had railed like fence posts into the ground to form a
circle around his bodhi tree. Janice had been hesitant when Carl suggested
Dharamshala as the destination for their first trip together. She trusted him,
but what if they snapped under the stresses of traveling and unraveled on the
opposite side of the world?
But he’d convinced her. He’d wanted to meet the Dalai Lama and she became
curious to see traces of a country that was daily paling into myth. She’d
admired his spontaneity and optimism; he’d admired her attention to detail and
pursuit of context. They’d stay the night in the Capital before flying north the
next morning; their rickshaw, commissioned to bring them to a hotel—any
hotel—cruised every street in the city before depositing them at a travel
agency. A national holiday—an election—an important event—every room booked or
closed. The agent, one of those people who tries to get close fast, had offered
them tea and then hash. His Hawaiian shirt had commanded the dingy fluorescent
room.
While Carl strummed the cheap blue guitar he’d bought that afternoon the map
spun off the wall beside Janice, swirling around and pinning her to that folding
chair like a tilt-a-whirl where the floor drops out. A phone cord wrapped the
agent’s finger while he rang the airport. Snow in the mountains—flights canceled
for a week, at least—twenty thousand rupees for a jeep ride through the night.
Carl was a picture of sentiment and gratitude. Which alarmed Janice. Like in the
Wizard of Oz when the world shrieks into color then everyone showers in
asbestos. She gripped the cold metal seat as though it would stop the roads and
the rivers and the Lines of Control and Actual Control from streaming around
her, choking her delicate frame. No, no, no, she’d shouted. I don’t believe. I—.
We have to leave.
7. Afternoon
Carl spread a towel on the beach. Janice stretched out in a tide pool. She
tunneled her feet into the sand until they vanished, fingering the laces on the
boots beside her. “That woman yesterday,” she said. Carl tilted his head toward
her. She couldn’t tell if his eyes were opened or closed under his sunglasses.
“Yeah?” He said. “Wasn’t that her in the grill this morning?”
Janice nodded. “Didn’t she tell us she’d lost her son?”
“I think so.” He combed his fingers through the sand. “I think that guy got the
details mixed up.”
“That’s a pretty significant detail to mess up.”
Carl shrugged. “I saw some kind of fun house when I went walking this morning.
At the end of the island. Did you hear that NASA released the first photo from
Hubble yesterday?”
“Do you not find it strange?”
“What, space? I saw it in the paper. Didn’t look like much.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“One star kind of resembled a dot and the other kind of resembled a snowman
abandoned without a head.”
Janice glared at him.
Carl rolled his eyes. Then he filled his cheeks with air and exhaled slowly,
forcefully. “Who are you accusing, Janice?”
8. Evening
The museum had been disappointing. It was a house—she tried to remember how it
went—but in any case it was like a pyramid now, with a central room nested in a
slightly larger room that was nested in another and so on and so forth. The
center room was triangular, no wider than your arm span. Each wall was covered
in fire alarms. They looked identical except some were all red and some were all
gray. And all super retro, like they were yanked off the walls of that high
school in Grease. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the
distribution. If you pulled any of them, Janice learned, the door would close
and the floor would begin lowering and plastic citrus fruits would come pouring
in, like a ball pit. Janice and Carl had clung to each other as they’d gone
down. When the lemons were up to their waists the floor stopped. Then a little
compartment had opened beside them and the balls drained out and then the floor
went back up. In the throne room a toilet had been made to look like an old
fashioned chair. Janice thought that was gross.
After dinner the last artifacts of light withered over the ocean. Janice flopped
into a rocking chair on the porch and opened a collection of short stories she’d
recently received from a college friend. The accompanying piece of stationary
fluttered out and she leaned down to retrieve it. Facts are not everything, the
loose cursive alleged.
Carl rocked beside her and played around with her Walkman. Then he cracked the
knuckles in all of his fingers and all of his toes and then he paced. Janice had
read the same line a dozen times now. But she was not going to snap. She would
not snap. Would she come with Carl to the local bar? She would not. Five minutes
later, he asked again. Ten minutes later, he slid into his Nikes. Would she join
him later, if she changed her mind? Yeah, yes, okay.
Alone, she felt relieved. The tide was falling; the beach deepened like the
blank dome of someone’s head beneath a receding hairline. It was as though he
closed doors simply by existing in her proximity. She couldn’t point to any
particular thing he did or said—but he wasn’t even closing doors. She was
closing doors when he came close enough. Gradually she’d forgotten that she was
cramped, out in that narrow hallway where sunlight leaked in for forty minutes
every day and now and then she touched a doorknob wistfully. Where did doubt
germinate? What infinitely subtle tension at the corners of his eyes, what
split-second oscillation in his tone had done this to her? One wanted to
preserve one’s self, after all. One could never be sure how much the other was
giving, or how much they would take if they had the chance.
9. Human Behavior
Except for the Silent Generation, marine life, and the fundamental drivers of
human behavior, the bar was older than anything on the island. Operation
Rumblebee redeemed a retired observation tower where they’d traced missiles as
they shot off the continent in the wake of World War Two. Inside it was cramped.
The single room measured somewhere between a dive bar and a linen closet. The
air, like the postwar-themed cocktails, tasted salty and laborious. The
bartender grew up in the same small town as Carl, who was drinking Berlin
Airlifts and wiggling his toes in the empty place in his shoes. Carl watched the
bartender slide ice cube trays beneath the faucet, then observed that the ice in
his own drink had dwindled into pebbles. He attempted to stir them using one of
the American flag toothpicks that were stacked beside the limes.
The first thing was pleasure. It preceded his perception of pressure, which
preceded the knowledge that something was rubbing against him. Everyone was
touching. People were like squares on a Rubix cube—people were like the
universe, really—moving, but where? But there was a kind of sustained pressure
now, and it pleased him, and he was not yet conscious of the woman who wanted
him, who had been watching him and wanting him very badly and who now was very
close.
“Where ya from?” The woman faced him. The pressure subsided. It felt like losing
something precious. He was suddenly, confoundingly sad.
“I’m Cara,” she said. “People call me Cara Cara. You know, like the orange.” Her
skin was orange and slick. Carl had read an article about orange. There wasn’t
even a word for the color until the Moors brought the fruit to Spain. Before
someone had dethroned someone else (Who had dethroned whom? He couldn’t
remember.), a dab of sun on the world’s rim had merely loitered in the
hinterland between red and yellow. Perhaps they’d called it flame vine or
monarch or denoument. She ran her fingers through her damp yellow hair until
they snagged. For a moment she tried to force them through a knot and Carl found
this painful to watch.
“Hi Cara.” He tried to focus on the scrunchie on her wrist.
She extended her hand. It hung loosely in the air. Carl grasped it and kind of
moved it around.
“What’s your name?”
“Cara,” he said. “I mean, Carl. Like, um, Marx.”
Cara giggled. She touched his arm. “Are you hot? You want to go upstairs?”
Carl had thought that they were upstairs. Was he hot? He tried to feel. He
guessed he felt hot; he couldn’t say with any certainty. He was moving toward
the exit, it seemed, without volition, as though lofted by the will of—what?
Some spirit? Some god? Some fate divined in clumps of space dust? He could never
tell. The room was an organism; it spit him out.
10. On the Roof She Was Expansive
On the roof she was expansive. The moon draped her arms like fabric, like the
ocean. It was impossible to say what the moon was like against her arms—it
changed each time he looked. Somewhere a radio played an old Drifters song. He
remembered his mom teaching him to shag dance when he was a kid. Behind the
roller rink the tide had roared and surged beneath Ben King’s magic voice.
Triple step, triple step, rock step. Triple step, triple step, she’d guided him,
twirling him around.
“I love this song,” Cara whispered. She whisked her hair into a fountainous
ponytail and her dress shifted over the contours of her body. He tried not to
look at her breasts. “Under the boardwalk, by the seeeeaaa, yeah-uh yeah-uh,”
she crooned. She smelled like Black & Milds and too-ripe fruit.
Recently, in the waiting room of his dentist’s office, Carl had watched a
Discovery Channel program on voles—those rodents from the Midwest. Prairie
voles, the little empaths, associated pleasure with the smell of a single
lady-vole—he imagined a family of bonnet-clad, hamster-esque creatures
delivering a covered wagon across the earnest Cimarron—while meadow voles fucked
indiscriminately. Something about receptors and oxytocin. He felt vaguely
confident that the program’s narrator had intended to develop an analogy for
human behavior but for the life of him he couldn’t remember the conclusion. She
kissed him. When he noticed the scattered stars he felt ashamed, like he was a
character in a parable whose vanity, the story went, would fuel his sorry
attempt to dodge the cosmic judiciary. His mouth burned. He imagined firing
rockets into the void, escalating toward some situation that could not be taken
back. Red tails flaming through the weird unfathomable night.
“Carl?”
Carl felt like someone had wrenched his head out of a swimming pool. Janice.
“Janice?”
Yes.
11. First and Enduring Regret
Janice’s first and enduring regret, when the crazy lady stepped into the
elevator on the second floor on Sunday evening, was wearing her boots in the
ocean. They were dark with damp and crusted with sand. A strand of seaweed poked
out from one twisted, currant-colored lace. “Bill,” Crazy Lady said. “Come on,
Bill.”
Bill entered the elevator tongue-first, dragging his hind legs and scratching
his belly on the tile. Crazy Lady wore hot pink ASICS. She turned toward Janice.
“My brother’s name is Bill, funny enough. He retired on Friday.”
DING!
“Oh, good for him,” Janice said. Then she froze. Then she said, “What did he
do?”
DING!
“I don’t know, but he did it for about fifty years.” Crazy Lady smiled at
Janice. Crazy Lady seemed very pleased. Janice tried to imagine the kind of
person who would name their Dachshund Bill.
DING!
Crazy Lady looked at Bill, who was now prancing and doing these little jumps.
Then her eyes traveled across the floor of the elevator. Janice could have
watched an entire episode of Unsolved Mysteries in the time it took this
elevator to climb six stories—each ding felt like someone was driving an ice
pick into her brain. Wait, what was that? Was Crazy Lady frowning? She must have
been suspicious. She was definitely squinting. Was she? She was very subtle. No,
she wasn’t. She would say something. Wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t Janice?
DING!
●Inside his apartment she took them off and clapped them together over the
bathtub. Sand shook from them like salt. He was sleeping on the sofa with her
collected fictions spread over his face. She plucked it off and reviewed the
open page. The janitress was following her upstairs with her purse in her hand
and the same deep red fire flickering in her eyes. The janitress thrust the
purse towards her while they were still a half dozen steps apart, and said:
“Don't never tell on me. I musta been crazy. I get crazy in the head sometimes,
I swear I do. My son can tell you.”
She took the purse after a moment, and the janitress went on: “I got a niece who
is going on seventeen, and she's a nice girl and I thought I'd give it to her.
She needs a pretty purse. I musta been crazy, I thought maybe you wouldn't mind,
you leave things around and don't seem to notice much.”
Janice tossed the book onto the coffee table. She looked around Carl’s
apartment. A single lamp burned in the corner of the living room and nothing,
she realized, looked familiar to her—it was as though she had wandered into the
home of a stranger. Had she seen this rug before, with all of this dizzying
geometry? Yes, she had, but it had never been so overwhelming as it was now.
This must be what the Minotaur had felt like, she thought—one day free, the next
day at the heart of a labyrinth sprawling in every direction. She lay down
beside Carl, whom she’d once known intimately, and gradually slipped from
bewilderment into sleep.
12. Say She Wakes to a Sound as Sharp as a Knife
Say she wakes to a sound as sharp as a knife. Describe how it cuts in waves, how
he seals his ears with sweaty palms. Say she glances at the microwave, say it’s
3:14 a.m., say she improvises some variation of Carl what the fuck. Describe how
he flaps his elbows and lunges toward the door. Say the hallway does not smell
like smoke.
Imagine septuagenarians in bathrobes. Imagine twentysomethings in oversized
Nirvana t-shirts. Imagine septuagenarians in frills and straps milling around on
the sidewalk. Of course, imagine dogs. Paco the Pekingese. Cha Cha the Chow
Chow. Bedlam the Bedlington Terrier, little lamb. Bill. Big men in chartreuse
stripes and helmets dashing from stern gleaming scarlet engines toward a
building that hasn’t burned and won’t. Questions down the block.
●Hoses? Do we need hoses? No, no hoses. False alarm. Ha. No pun intended.
Someone was confused.
And there she is, in the middle of everything.
Say she looks at her, nudges him. Look.
A practical joke, a practical joke
she says. Say she shuffles around, this ancient
woman in girlish ASICS, tuning the witching
hour to some obscure frequency. Say she says
to the big men in hard hats,This is all practically a joke,
and looks around.Don't you agree?
Imagine her scanning the faces.Don't you?
Imagine the dogs! Don't you agree?
Say she sees them. Don't you?
Say she looks in their faces, their eyes.Don't you agree?
Does she find their shoes familiar?Don't you?
The green swoosh?Don't you?
The spent leather, the cherry lace?Don't you find them?
Say she looks them in the eye, oneDon't you?
and then the otherDon't you just want to pull it sometimes?
Under the blue and righteous moonDon't you want to?
does she spin them like dollsYes?
until they know she knows and know Sometimes?
they do not know?Yes.
She does. Don't you?1. They Would Have to Build a Town
They would have to build a town, stat. Bill Bird watched a stroke of sand drift
from his fingers. Gulls squalled over the barren beach. Marram grass,
salt-crusted and limp with humidity, nodded in the hot wind like barflies on
Sunday morning.
Besides Oswaldo Fudge, Bill hadn’t seen another person on the island. Bill hated
Oswaldo. He tried to remember if he had actually hated someone before. Maybe
when he was a kid. He wished Oswaldo nothing but the worst. Like, if they didn’t
need to build a town here he would absolutely take that dinghy back to the coast
and leave Oswaldo marooned forever like they did in stories. He’d do that in a
heartbeat.
They’d driven as far east as they could go and then they’d had to drive back to
Holly Ridge to lift a dinghy off of one of the town’s twenty-seven residents.
Strapping a dinghy to the roof of Oswaldo’s Roadmaster had been a comedy of
errors. And then they’d driven as far east as they could go, again.
Oswaldo probably slept with his mother. He was just so anxious to be tenured. He
was just unequivocally certain that they could trust the coastal map they’d
unearthed from the viscera of the University library. They’d never even heard of
the cartographers!
Grateful that none of their colleagues were there to see it, they’d managed to
steer the little boat to the last piece of land between their bootsoles and
Casablanca. That’s where they found nobody and, for that reason, would have to
build a town. Like, stat. Which made Bill wonder, how did one go about doing
that? Building a town?
It seemed like a lot of work.
For a moment, it had been like a dream. There was talk of Bill being appointed
as an Assistant Professor. Which was big. He was still riding the high of his
success when he received a letter from some Hugh Francis and some Nikki Argus,
who were threatening litigation. Why? Because Bill’s map unquestionably
plagiarized the map they—Francis and Argus—had published several years earAndrew Najberg | Short Story
Even approaching evening, the heat was the kind one’s body didn’t believe,
where people suffered strokes because it couldn’t bake them that fast. It was
the kind in which folk made YouTube videos about cooking eggs on their
dashboard, swimming pools felt like a baby’s bathwater where swimmers sweated
with their heads submerged, and the sun slapped one at the front door.
Despite this, Edward crouched by the pond, digging stones, looking for smooth,
flat ones. Sweat poured from his armpits, down the back of his neck, his inner
thighs. It was so humid that another couple percentage points would allow him to
swim off into the sky. A tightening in his throat did set off a couple warnings
in the back of his mind since he’d already drank the whole bottle of water he’d
brought, but he’d rather push himself to a physical brink than deal with the
mental misery entailed in going home.
His parents were in the middle of a divorce but had yet to suss out the living
situation, so mom slept in the bedroom, dad in the basement. They met in the
middle to fight and lecture Edward. His mom had found God through her husband’s
affair, and she pressed Edward to be a better believer whenever possible. His
dad pressed him to believe in going to college because “the sooner you get into
the world the better.” Rick, his younger brother, believed that Edward
interrupted his live-streams and impeded his ascent into an internet sensation.
For his part, Edward struggled to believe in anything. Seventeen, living in a
household burning itself down, failing half his classes, and lacking
relationships he might consider meaningful, it followed that he hadn’t developed
a meaningful relationship with the universe.
Perhaps that was why he spent so much time by the pond anticipating the plicks
of a well- skipped stone, watching ducks leave little deltas, whacking skunk
cabbage with sticks like he was teeing off. Little lizards rustled among the
dried grass around the rocks. Hawks circled overhead. Frogs croaked at the sun
and plopped into the water among reeds.
That day, such a plop, an unusually large one among a bank of cattails, drew him
to the water’s edge. There, among erosion exposed roots and submerged water
grasses, amid the scattering tadpoles was a great, white feather, long as his
forearm. Near the shaft, silvery gray chevrons streaked the vale. It was the
base of the hollow shaft, however, that fixed Edward’s eye.
It was bright crimson, and from it a drop of blood fell. The drop hit the water
and dissipated among the disturbed silt in which tadpoles hid.
Edward picked up the feather between thumb and forefinger and held it to the
light. What kind of bird was it from? A huge white eagle or something. Edward
looked about, scanning the skies and the trees. For the feather to still have
blood in it, it must be fresh, but he’d been there an hour at least. He wasn’t
that observant, but he couldn’t have missed a bird large enough for this
feather. Another couple drops of blood fell to the grass.
Edward smiled and said, “That’s so cool.”
Then, he realized how badly the sun was beating down on him, and he set off
home, the feather continuing its drip, drip, drip like an old faucet.
●When Edward reached his house, he headed straight for the back door, halting
just before the back stoop. The feather was still dripping (how, he wondered),
and while he didn’t have a problem with blood, both his parents would have a
problem with him dripping a trail of blood across the house.
He headed to the old lawn shed and rummaged about until he found an old plastic
mop-bucket. It was full of spiderwebs and dirt which he shook out, and then he
slipped the feather inside. He then slipped himself inside his house and slipped
off his shoes, careful to make sure his mom wasn’t home yet, watchful of the
basement door lest his father, who worked from home, might pop up to ‘say hey’.
He crept in his sweat drenched socks around all the linoleum patches and
floorboards that were known creakers.
At the top of the stairs, he approached his brother’s door. He really wanted to
show the feather to someone. It was, after all, weird. Maybe magical.
Unfortunately, the torrent of gunfire and obscenities muffled by the door
indicated that interruptions would be unwise. If Rick thought he’d lose a viewer
or get a negative tag in the comment section, it was the apocalypse.
Instead, Edward entered his own room and went straight to his closet. He pulled
an old box of toys and put the bucket in its place. He changed into clothes that
weren’t drenched and didn’t smell like a gym bag. Then, he sat at his desk,
queued up some dubstep, and tried to research bleeding feathers on his laptop
with little success. The best he found were stories of statues crying blood and
bleeding chimneys. All of them had natural explanations.
No doubt, the feather had one too.
Uncertain of a better way to proceed, Edward emailed Mr. Eddlestein, the high
school biology teacher. Edward wasn’t the best student, but he liked biology and
hoped he had some of Mr. Eddlestein’s goodwill, especially since it was summer
break.
He’d just hit send when he heard the garage door open. Because spending so much
time out in the sun had worked up both an appetite and thirst, he headed
downstairs.
●In the morning, the first thing Edward did was check on the feather. He’d had a
dream that he found the feather all over again. It was incredibly vivid; walking
the pond’s edge, he came upon that same thicket of reeds and cattails. The only
difference was that he could feel his feet crushing tadpoles with every step
even though they weren’t in the water, and the feather wasn’t just sitting
there. Instead, it was attached to the eight foot, severed wing of some
titan-bird that had never graced zoology books. Cicada and frog songs rose to a
deafening crescendo, and, as he closed his hand upon the feather, it gushed
blood.
He’d woken up sitting bolt upright.
To his relief, only a couple inches of blood stewed in the bucket, though it
felt odd to feel relieved to find a bucket with a couple inches of blood inside
his closet.
He was also relieved when he checked his email afterwards and found that Mr.
Eddlestein had replied:
Edward,
I appreciate that even in summer you take a keen interest in science, and I
thank you for thinking of me as your first recourse upon finding such a
fascinating item.
I must admit that this might be outside my expertise. However, Dr. Elsa Foster
at State is an old friend of mine, and I feel you might be able to garner her
interest. I will forward you an email with her contact information and office
number.
Thanks,
Tim Eddlestein
The forwarded email was in Edward’s spam folder, but it was there. He took a
short video of the feather dripping blood into the bucket and sent it to the
professor as an attachment to as polite an email as he could muster, concluding
it with both his phone number and Twitter handle. Then, he closed his laptop.
He was about to get up, but he hesitated. On the window above his desk were what
appeared to be a set of muddy handprints. The prints were oddly misshapen. The
fingers were longer than his and all wrong. There were only three and a thumb.
Or were there really four fingers, with two just pressed together?
His ringtone, a snippet of a song he’d loved before he set it as his ringtone
just about stopped his heart. To his amazement, it was the professor, and within
minutes he’d made an appointment for later in the morning. A quick Google said
it would take over forty minutes to get there, not leaving Edward a whole lot of
time.
Downstairs, his mom found it off-putting that he’d meet with a professor at a
school during the summer, especially one of the opposite sex, but his dad was
like a Baptist at the rapture. The last thing he heard as he headed out the door
was his dad telling his mom that he told her so.
●Dr. Foster’s office was a small office on the bottom floor of a red brick
building that could easily have been transplanted from any number of
universities. She was a petite woman who carried a silver travel mug and wore a
plain green t-shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was pulled in a ponytail, and she
wore yellow plastic glasses. A tattoo peaked out from under her sleeve, but
Edward couldn’t tell of what it was.
Edward himself wore black slacks with the only button-up shirt in his closet
because he figured that’s the kind of thing one wore to talk to a college
professor. If he weren’t holding a bucket with a bleeding feather inside it, he
would have felt out of place. To be fair, he wasn’t convinced that the feather
belonged anywhere, but by not belonging anywhere, it kind of belonged
everywhere.
Unfortunately, Dr. Foster’s immediate response was that she wanted to send the
feather off to a colleague’s laboratory at Vanderbilt to have tests run.
Though no thought of its kind had struck Edward before, he immediately felt
possessive of the feather and couldn’t consider relinquishing it. The feather
might well be the only special thing he’d ever found, the only special thing he
would ever find. After all, it really was kind of magical. Magical enough that a
university professor wanted it studied.
Dr. Foster wasn’t happy at how quickly Edward dismissed himself, but Edward
figured at worst he could just not apply to that university.
Outside in the parking lot, Edward pulled the feather from the bucket and
emptied the bucket into the nearest storm drain. He felt weird pouring a bucket
of blood into the sewer, but it had to be organic and biodegradable. After all,
wasn’t blood kind of like life itself? That’s what the vampire movies said.
At his car, key in hand, Edward cocked his head. There were large blotches of
mud all around the car. Of course, Edward wouldn’t have expected the parking lot
to be clean, but the mud seemed fresh and wet despite the morning heat already
beginning to rise.
Nonetheless, Edward hopped in the car, set the bucket on the passenger
floorboard, and started the engine. What next? Should he call the newspaper? A
TV station?
Instead, he sat back as the air conditioner started to blow slightly cooler air
out and did what any teenager would do in this situation, what he should have
done from the beginning: he crowdsourced solutions by asking on Twitter, TikTok,
and Instagram.
Within minutes, several of his friends had responded. The first said, “WTF
dude.” The second, “I want one.” The third called him an attention whore, the
fourth that his blood CGI needed work. The fifth said he was cursed, and the
sixth offered him a hundred bucks.
Edward closed his phone and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then, he saw the
billboard: an advertisement for Heavenly Ale. Heavenly Ale was one of those
microbrews made by monks in a monastery. If the feather really was magical,
monks would surely know.
●The monastery was a short drive along the highway that ran parallel to the
river. Edward half-expected to turn on a dirt road and see windmills and people
on horseback, but the building was nestled on a good-sized plot between a
factory that produced cheese crackers and another that produced tile cleaner.
The parking lot was large and set behind a barbed wire fence, and the sign at
the lot’s entrance had a corporate logo that Edward associated with the big
beers like Bud and Miller, though he was not sure to which. Nevertheless, Edward
parked his car at the edge of the lot overlooking the river.
He sat a moment, looking at the riverbank, at the thickets of bushes and rocks
and cattails that grew there, and he thought again about the moment he’d found
the feather. Had it been some sort of destiny? Was he meant to have it?
He crossed the parking lot to the entrance. By the front doors, a ticket booth
like one might find at an old-fashioned theater was built into the wall, and a
bored looking attendant in a blue hat and vest sat chewing gum and painting her
nails.
“Um, hey,” Edward said. “I want to talk to the monks.”
The attendant clicked her tongue. Her name tag said Helen.
“Wow. This place hasn’t been an actual monastery for years.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope, monks got bought out almost ten years ago.”
Edward kicked the sidewalk. The blood in the bucket plopped.
“But I’ve seen ads-“
“Yeah, they bought the rights to the story,” she said. Then, she furrowed her
brow and tried to lean forward. The plexiglass stopped her from being able to
see down in the bucket. As she sat back, she asked “Whatcha got there?”
Edward considered saying nothing because he couldn’t come up with a good reason
to be carrying a bucket around, but he answered, “A bucket of blood and a
feather.”
“Cool,” Helen said, rolling her eyes. “I get that.”
Edward sighed. He turned to walk towards his car, but Helen called out. He
looked back. Had she realized that he really was carrying a bucket of blood?
“You know,” she said, looking mildly concerned. “There’s a fella in accounting
named Murray; Pretty sure he actually WAS a monk here way back. If you want, I
can let you in to talk to him for half price cash.”
Edward sighed again and continued towards the car. He wouldn’t speak with Murray
in accounting, not for free let alone half price. He’d been so convinced that
there must be some larger purpose to this, but what if he was like those yahoos
who saw Jesus in their cornflakes? What if it was some fluke and all the tests
in the world said life was a pointless misfire? Maybe he should just dump the
bucket in the river, he thought, or take up that kid for a hundred bucks or go
back to that professor at the university. Maybe-
The thought broke off as something hot and wet lashed around Edward, locking his
arms to his sides with a wet slap. Edward looked down to see some sort of
glistening, pink rope. The rope, taut as tent wire, stretched away and up, to
the roof of Edward’s car.
There, it disappeared into the mouth of a massive frog. It was so large that the
roof of the car had collapsed under its weight. Its skin was a pebbled olive
green and deep brown, and its enormous yellow eyes had black, cross shaped
pupils. Its webbed feet clung to the car frame, and its powerful hind legs
flexed and tensed, ready to leap at the slightest provocation.
Edward struggled against the tongue, but its grip was like a titan’s fist.
The voice came inside his head, and it wasn’t in words, but rather an impression
intermingled with the buzz of flies.
No point fighting me. I can pull you down my gullet before you blink.
“Have I lost my shit?” was Edward’s response. It felt like a good response, like
the only response he could give at this point.
I am Amphimorian, The God Frog.
“Yeah, heat stroke,” Edward said. “Do I know what hospital I’m at?”
This is real. The feather you possess belonged to the bird menace Aviallius. It
is an incarnation of evil that has plagued my kind, eating entire family lines
in a single meal with no respect for the natural balance of things.
Edward wanted to make some scoffing retort that conveyed he knew he was talking
to himself, that talking to a hallucination was talking to yourself, but he felt
irrationally threatened.
I tracked you by following the scent of the demon’s blood. I must devour the
feather lest he return and continue to prey upon my people.
Edward felt the desire to bolt grow. It really bothered him that his
hallucination seemed able to immobilize him. Hallucinations couldn’t physically
restrain him, but what if his mind convinced his body that his arms were stuck?
What if this was really a sign that his systems were failing and that he’d
collapse like human shaped Jell-O? The power of suggestion was impressive,
especially when it came to things people tried to convince themselves of. Could
Helen see him from her booth? Was he standing with his arms pressed to his side
like a penguin? Was she calling security to have him removed?
Your doubt is understandable. Doubt is the lantern your species sees by.
“I’m having a psychic conversation with a giant frog,” Edward said. However, he
extended his right index finger so that it pointed into the bucket his other
fingers still held. “But if you want the damn feather so much, take it.”
Immediately, the tongue released, retracted like a measuring tape, and lashed
back out. The bucket vanished from beside Edward straight into the Frog’s
massive mouth.
A gunshot barked. Edward jumped a full foot in the air. Like a frog, he thought.
A shudder ran through the frog’s body and a spray of grayish green blood blasted
out the side of its head, one of its eyes obliterated in the exit wound. Edward
craned his neck just in time to see a uniformed security guard running forward
with a 9mm extended. The muzzle flashed. Edward crushed his eyes shut and
slapped his hands over his ears as the deafening boom of five more shots jolted
his bones.
When the sound had faded and the smell of gunsmoke wafted into his nostrils,
Edward chanced opening his eyes.
The guard stood in a firing stance with his gun still aimed.
The giant frog wobbled on the roof, oozing sludge-like blood. It slumped to the
side and rolled off the car, striking the lot pavement with a wet smack. Its
tongue rolled out of its mouth towards Edward like a wet carpet.
“Are you okay?” The guard asked Edward. “What the hell is that thing?”
Edward didn’t have a chance to answer. The body bucked. Something sharp and
yellow thrust through its abdomen and jerked side to side like someone shoving a
knife through a bedsheet and cutting through. What had seemed to be a blade was
a glistening beak, and a massive white heron’s head shoved itself out of the
frog’s innards. Two powerful wings followed. Its legs followed, two dull orange,
scaly things dripping with viscera, and it kicked the frog’s body away from its
talons like a toddler kicking off a shoe.
When it stretched its wings, they were themselves the lengths of cars. Edward
breathed shallow, and his heart pounded. The security guard seemed to have
forgotten he was holding a gun, and his hands just fell away from it and dangled
while the weapon clattered to the cement.
The bird jolted the frame of its wings, snapping off the remaining moisture that
still clung to it from inside the frog. It spattered across the agog faces of
the onlookers.
Then, it gave its wings a tremendous flap that nearly knocked both Edward and
the guard off their feet with the wind created. It flapped again, faster, and,
as its feet left the ground, Edward leaned into the resulting gale.
All at once, the heron-beast Aviallius let loose a shrieking cry and took off in
straight flight like a rising bullet. Within seconds, it had vanished over the
curve of the horizon.
Edward gasped and swallowed, gasped and swallowed. He patted himself all over
his torso and head to make sure that he was real and intact, and he knew without
doubt that he would never doubt again.
END Author’s Note
Astronomers have long said that our solar system is ideally situated in a tucked
away corner of the galaxy to allow us to observe the universe around us. The
skies above and the ocean below swim with the fantastical; life we barely
understand, phenomenon we can hardly conceive even with all we know. Life
leaves us a simple choice, then: to accept or to inquire. “Something to Believe
In” presents the central character with that choice in the form of a bleeding
feather. Despite his youth, he finds himself on the path of inquiry and, just
as in real life, the answers frustrate or seem to seek their own ends rather
than any greater understanding. However, when finally confronted with an answer
that is simultaneously rational and irrational, he comes to understand that
knowing there is an answer at all is often the point. Even approaching evening, the heat was the kind one’s body didn’t believe,
where people suffered strokes because it couldn’t bake them that fast. It was
the kind in which folk made YouTube videos about cooking eggs on their
dashboard, swimming pools felt like a baby’s bathwater where swimmers sweated
with their heads submerged, and the sun slapped one at the front door.
Despite this, Edward crouched by the pond, digging stones, looking for smooth,
flat ones. Sweat poured from his armpits, down the back of his neck, his inner
thighs. It was so humid that another couple percentage points would allow him to
swim off into the sky. A tightening in his throat did set off a couple warnings
in the back of his mind since he’d already drank the whole bottle of water he’d
brought, but he’d rather push himself to a physical brink than deal with the
mental misery entailed in going home.
His parents were in the middle of a divorce but had yet to suss out the living
situation, so mom slept in the bedroom, dad in the basement. They met in the
middle to fight and lecture Edward. His mom had found God through her husband’s
affair, and she pressed Edward to be a better believer whenever possible. His
dad pressed him to believe in going to college because “the sooner you get into
the world the better.” Rick, his younger brother, believed that Edward
interrupted his live-streams and impeded his ascent into an internet sensation.
For his part, Edward struggled to believe in anything. Seventeen, living in a
household burning itself down, failing half his classes, and lacking
relationships he might consider meaningful, it followed that he hadn’t developed
a meaningful relationship with the universe.
Perhaps that was why he spent so much time by the pond anticipating the plicks
of a well- skipped stone, watching ducks leave little deltas, whacking skunk
cabbage with sticks like he was teeing off. Little lizards rustled among the
dried grass around the rocks. Hawks circled overhead. FrNatalka Bilotserkivets | Poetry
Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below.
Not everyone has returned. Not all names have been revived.
Silence has not yet been lifted from every crime.
Leaden shadows lay at the feet of gray buildings.
Give me their pedigree, from the thirties to the eighties!
Where the state machine ground their bones and minds,
Where the bloody work had not yet stopped,
Let the names converge on dry Kazakh sands,
On Kolyma’s gold dust, on Mordovia’s mud.
Let us into the archives—the lists, the denouncements, reports,
To the soft dispositions, the hard red revolutions,
To know in person who stoked those October embers
And eviscerated the country by counterrevolutionary fires.
Here a people died out. Here vodka crushed parents.
Here peers languished from acetone and rock.
While at the top, powerful portraits of leaders floated,
A mustache twitched, eyebrows furrowed self-righteously.
And when I look at trees in pink dew,
At children, at the honey flowers, which wander the meadows…
Not everyone has returned. But not everyone has gone yet.
Our song is not the same, and all our rebukes have rusted.
*
Ще не всі повернулись. Не всі імена ожили.
Ще над злочином кожним покрови мовчання не зняті.
Під будівлями сірими тіні похмурі лягли –
Дайте їх родовід, від тридцятих по вісімдесяті!
Де машина державна трощила кістки і мізки,
Де недавно іще не спинялась кривава робота –
Хай зійдуть імена на сухі казахстанські піски,
На піски золоті Колими, на мордовські болота.
Допустіть до архівів – до списків, доносів, заяв,
До м’яких розпоряджень, червоних твердих резолюцій,
Щоб пізнати в лице, хто роздмухав з жовтневих заграв
І спустошив країну пожежами контрреволюцій!
...Тут народ вимирав. Тут горілка чавила батьків.
Тут чамріли ровесники від ацетону і року.
А вгорі пропливали могутні портрети, вождів,
Ворушилися вуса, напучливо кущились брови...
І коли я дивлюсь на дерева в рожевій росі,
На дітей, на квітки медяні, що блукають лугами, —
Ще не всі повернулись, але і пішли ще не всі.
Наша пісня не та, і поржавіли наші нагани.
Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a
founding editor of Four Way Books, is the author of six poetry collections
including Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in
Poetry.
A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian
for ten years. Her latest work, Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories, an
anthology in support of Ukrainians today, is soon out from Deep Vellum Press.
Their collection of Natalka Bilotserkivets's poetry, Eccentric Days of Hope and
Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021) was shortlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize
and the Derek Wolcott Prize for Poetry.
Translator’s Note
“Not Everyone has Returned,” published in 1989 in her collection Lystopad
(November), warns that “silence has not yet been lifted from every crime.” For
comfort and spiritual communion, she turns to nature covered with pink dew
suggesting tears as well as innocence and children wandering meadows as signs of
regeneration and hope. A feeling of unwavering courage is present, as there is
in much of Natalka’s work. Her speakers have often suffered unimaginable
disasters, both personal and collective, yet they still believe life could
improve, that it is worth living. While their aspiration for the future is not
naïve, neither is it cynical. Freedom, whether of movement or access to
information, is restricted in Natalka’s world. But even within these
restrictions, some type of movement is possible; freedom will be found.Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below.
Not everyone has returned. Not all names have been revived.
Silence has not yet been lifted from every crime.
Leaden shadows lay at the feet of gray buildings.
Give me their pedigree, from the thirties to the eighties!
Where the state machine ground their bones and minds,
Where the bloody work had not yet stopped,
Let the names converge on dry Kazakh sands,
On Kolyma’s gold dust, on Mordovia’s mud.
Let us into the archives—the lists, the denouncements, reports,
To the soft dispositions, the hard red revolutions,
To know in person who stoked those October embers
And eviscerated the country by counterrevolutionary fires.
Here a people died out. Here vodka crushed parents.
Here peers languished from acetone and rock.
While at the top, powerful portraits of leaders floated,
A mustache twitched, eyebrows furrowed self-righteously.
And when I look at trees in pink dew,
At children, at the honey flowers, which wander the meadows…
Not everyone has returned. But not everyone has gone yet.
Our song is not the same, and all our rebukes have rusted.
*
Ще не всі повернулись. Не всі імена ожили.
Ще над злочином кожним покрови мовчання не зняті.
Під будівлями сірими тіні похмурі лягли –
Дайте їх родовід, від тридцятих по вісімдесяті!
Де машина державна трощила кістки і мізки,
Де недавно іще не спинялась кривава робота –
Хай зійдуть імена на сухі казахстанські піски,
На піски золоті Колими, на мордовські болота.
Допустіть до архівів – до списків, доносів, заяв,
До м’яких розпоряджень, червоних твердих резолюцій,
Щоб пізнати в лице, хто роздмухав з жовтневих заграв
І спустошив країну пожежами контрреволюцій!
...Тут народ вимирав. Тут горілка чавила батьків.
Тут чамріли ровесники від ацетону і року.
А вгорі пропливали могутні портрети, вождів,
Ворушилися вуса, напучливо кущились брови...
І коли я дивлюсь на дерева в рожевій росі,
На дітей, на квітки медяні, що блукають лугами, —
Ще не всі поверNatalka Bilotserkivets | Poetry
Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below.
This red fire of dry stalks—
and what dry stalks
and sweet crackling of first rains!—
of fallen leaves that fell for a long time,
warm with currant smoke, or maybe raspberry,
the gentle crunch of branches cut from bushes
slowly unfolded. The ashy edges grew,
and the broken toy the child carried over
and laid at the foot of perhaps its first temple
only smoked through the varnish
of its dirty, wooden side.
O, red fire with the blue, violet eye!
Noon, and then, at once, an evening village—
a child who’s grabbed onto its mother,
dark groves far beyond the river.
Suddenly and everywhere—here
on the quiet, sleepy street, in the dark
groves far beyond the river,
fires blaze up in rays of evening sun
and the smoke of sweet leaves
spread its arms to us.
And when the evening oval faces lit up,
cleansed with sparkling grain and strange delight,
we tossed the child in the air, kissed
and twirled with it—and laughed
as if we, too, were children.
You will never die—in your little blue coat;
your thin lips will never break,
just as this fall evening will never disappear,
this fire that dances and flies into the air.
Can we not rejoice in the happy rhythm
that fills the universe and our hearts?
Can we not catch the divine light
wiping tears, like years, from our faces?
*
ВОГОНЬ
Цей червоний вогонь з бадилиння сухого,
а іще — із сухого-таки бадилиння
і солодкого тріскоту перших дощів;
із опалого листя, що падало довго,
з теплим димом смородини, може — малини,
ніжним хруском галузок, обтятих з кущів, —
розгортався поволі. Росли попелясті краї,та поламана цяцька, яку дитинча
притяглоі поклало в підніжжі свого щонайпершого храму,лиш диміла крізь лак
дерев’яним замурзаним боком. ...О червоний вогонь з голубим, фіолетовим оком!
Полудневе — і раптом вечірнє село,
дитинча, що руками схопилось за маму,
і далеко за річкою темні гаї...
Але раптом і скрізь — тутна вуличці тихій і сонній,і далеко туди, де за річкою
темні гаї, —спалахнули вогні у промінні вечірнього сонця,дим солодкого листя
простер нам обійми свої.І коли засвітились облич вечорові овали,
дивним захватом повні, іскристим омиті зерном,
ми дитину підкинули вгору і розцілували,
танцювали із нею, сміялися, наче воно.
Не помреш ти ніколи, ніколи — у курточці синій,
і не зломляться вічно тоненькі уста,
як не зникне ніколи цей вечір осінній,
цей вогонь, що танцює і в небо зліта.
Як же нам не радіти цим щастям і ритмом,
що пронизує всесвіт і наші серця?
Як же нам не ловити божественне світло,
витираючи сльози, мов роки, з лиця?..
Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a
founding editor of Four Way Books, is the author of six poetry collections
including Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in
Poetry.
A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian
for ten years. Her latest work, Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories, an
anthology in support of Ukrainians today, is soon out from Deep Vellum Press.
Their collection of Natalka Bilotserkivets's poetry, Eccentric Days of Hope and
Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021) was shortlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize
and the Derek Wolcott Prize for Poetry.
Translator’s Note
“Fire” (Lystopad) evokes personal and collective transcendence. We also get an
indication of the existence or passing of something. A feeling of unwavering
courage is present, as there is in much of Natalka’s work. Her speakers have
often suffered unimaginable disasters, both personal and collective, yet they
still believe life could improve, that it is worth living. While their
aspiration for the future is not naïve, neither is it cynical. Freedom, whether
of movement or access to information, is restricted in Natalka’s world. But even
within these restrictions, some type of movement is possible; freedom will be
found.Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below.
This red fire of dry stalks—
and what dry stalks
and sweet crackling of first rains!—
of fallen leaves that fell for a long time,
warm with currant smoke, or maybe raspberry,
the gentle crunch of branches cut from bushes
slowly unfolded. The ashy edges grew,
and the broken toy the child carried over
and laid at the foot of perhaps its first temple
only smoked through the varnish
of its dirty, wooden side.
O, red fire with the blue, violet eye!
Noon, and then, at once, an evening village—
a child who’s grabbed onto its mother,
dark groves far beyond the river.
Suddenly and everywhere—here
on the quiet, sleepy street, in the dark
groves far beyond the river,
fires blaze up in rays of evening sun
and the smoke of sweet leaves
spread its arms to us.
And when the evening oval faces lit up,
cleansed with sparkling grain and strange delight,
we tossed the child in the air, kissed
and twirled with it—and laughed
as if we, too, were children.
You will never die—in your little blue coat;
your thin lips will never break,
just as this fall evening will never disappear,
this fire that dances and flies into the air.
Can we not rejoice in the happy rhythm
that fills the universe and our hearts?
Can we not catch the divine light
wiping tears, like years, from our faces?
*
ВОГОНЬ
Цей червоний вогонь з бадилиння сухого,
а іще — із сухого-таки бадилиння
і солодкого тріскоту перших дощів;
із опалого листя, що падало довго,
з теплим димом смородини, може — малини,
ніжним хруском галузок, обтятих з кущів, —
розгортався поволі. Росли попелясті краї,та поламана цяцька, яку дитинча
притяглоі поклало в підніжжі свого щонайпершого храму,лиш диміла крізь лак
дерев’яним замурзаним боком. ...О червоний вогонь з голубим, фіолетовим оком!
Полудневе — і раптом вечірнє село,
дитинча, що руками схопилось за маму,
і далеко за річкою темні гаї...
Але раптом і скрізь — тутна вуличці тихій і сонній,і далеко туди, деNatalka Bilotserkivets | Poetry
Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below.
don’t be afraid
it’s just a breath just a moment
just a train speeding
up into the mountains
it’s a train
a lonely game a short dream
a railcar stopped in the mountains
a small mistake underlined in red
open up
no one is paying attention
everyone has their own soul
their lonely mistakes
death’s limits
it’s just
a short dream
a red-colored railcar
careening down from the mountain
don’t be afraid
*
ЧЕРВОНИЙ ВАГОН
не бійся
це тільки подих тільки мить
це просто потяг що спішить
угору в гори
це потяг
самотня гра короткий сон
у горах спинений вагон
маленька помилка підкреслена червоним
відкрийся
ніхто на тебе не зважа
у кожного своя душа
свої самотні помилки і межі смерті
це просто
з гори униз неначе сон
червоноколірний вагон
не бійся
Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a
founding editor of Four Way Books, is the author of six poetry collections
including Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in
Poetry.
A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian
for ten years. Her latest work, Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories, an
anthology in support of Ukrainians today, is soon out from Deep Vellum Press.
Their collection of Natalka Bilotserkivets's poetry, Eccentric Days of Hope and
Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021) was shortlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize
and the Derek Wolcott Prize for Poetry.
Translator’s Note
“Red Railcar” (Hotel' Tsentral', Hotel Central, 2004) presents a dramatic
duality: red is often associated with blood and fire: passion, danger, courage,
determination. The railcar itself can be seen as symbolizing life’s journey,
embodying power, and strength, but also as an unstoppable, threatening force.
A feeling of unwavering courage is present, as there is in much of Natalka’s
work. Her speakers have often suffered unimaginable disasters, both personal and
collective, yet they still believe life could improve, that it is worth living.
While their aspiration for the future is not naïve, neither is it cynical.
Freedom, whether of movement or access to information, is restricted in
Natalka’s world. But even within these restrictions, some type of movement is
possible; freedom will be found.Translations from Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Bios below.
don’t be afraid
it’s just a breath just a moment
just a train speeding
up into the mountains
it’s a train
a lonely game a short dream
a railcar stopped in the mountains
a small mistake underlined in red
open up
no one is paying attention
everyone has their own soul
their lonely mistakes
death’s limits
it’s just
a short dream
a red-colored railcar
careening down from the mountain
don’t be afraid
*
ЧЕРВОНИЙ ВАГОН
не бійся
це тільки подих тільки мить
це просто потяг що спішить
угору в гори
це потяг
самотня гра короткий сон
у горах спинений вагон
маленька помилка підкреслена червоним
відкрийся
ніхто на тебе не зважа
у кожного своя душа
свої самотні помилки і межі смерті
це просто
з гори униз неначе сон
червоноколірний вагон
не бійся
Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a
founding editor of Four Way Books, is the author of six poetry collections
including Bad Harvest, named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in
Poetry.
A former Peace Corps Volunteer, Ali Kinsella has been translating from Ukrainian
for ten years. Her latest work, Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories, an
anthology in support of Ukrainians today, is soon out from Deep Vellum Press.
Their collection of Natalka Bilotserkivets's poetry, Eccentric Days of Hope and
Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021) was shortlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize
and the Derek Wolcott Prize for Poetry.
Translator’s Note
“Red Railcar” (Hotel' Tsentral', Hotel Central, 2004) presents a dramatic
duality: red is often associated with blood and fire: passion, danger, courage,
determination. The railcar itself can be seen as symbolizing life’s journey,
embodying power, and strength, but also as an unstoppable, threatening force.
A feeling of unwavering courage is present, as there is in much of Natalka’s
work. Her speakers have often suffered unimaginable disasters, both personal and
collectDana Kanafina | The Necessary | Essay
Iam a petite, baby-faced woman. Many people close to me still joke about it. It
is all too familiar—every time I get ID'd at a bar (or worse, at a grocery
store), my friends snicker. Every time my little sister’s classmates ask her
which grade I’m in, she talks about it for weeks. It is simply comical when I
get excited over SpongeBob Squarepants on TV. I always argue that I am content
with a portion of my childhood engraved in me because this isn’t just my
experience—we as a country live exactly the same way.
I was born almost a decade after the collapse of the USSR, when Kazakhstan was
still new and shiny, barely stable after the 90s, the time notoriously hijacked
by those referred to as bandits and hooligans. We had to insert ourselves
somehow into the world that was—is—rapidly moving, fast-paced, creative, loud.
This insertion is a task we still haven’t quite completed, but back then it was
even more chaotic. I, an only child back then, lived in a khrushchevka with both
of my parents. The ceilings were barely taller than any adult. Four neighboring
apartments on the same floor were built during the Khruschev era, as the name
suggests. This place was where I resided most of the time. I barely went to a
kindergarten; I seemed permanently sick (I went through two major surgeries
before I was old enough to go to school) and my babysitters changed every few
months. People all around me were looking for things and places but even in
preschool it always felt to me like something was stopping us all.
After I turned seven years old, my parents decided to send me to a
Russian-speaking school, one of the oldest schools in my city. There were only a
handful of Kazakh-speaking ones anyway and they all were new—again, barely older
than the country itself. My parents, both Asian and hazardously young to be
parents in the first place, put me in a tight blouse, gave me a backpack and
dropped me off. They left me at school every morning with an unspoken
instruction to be civil, neat, and sensible, the way a white girl would be. Not
wild, untamed and horrid—a juxtaposition that only made sense in the young
Kazakhstan, with its unchecked, internalized xenophobia.
My first teacher, a ferociously permed Russian lady in her late sixties, I still
remember, carried a tiny Soviet flag. Every morning she’d take it out of her
bag, place it on the table, unright and static. It was dark red, with a crooked
familiar sickle in the middle of it. At the end of the school day she folded it,
placed it into her bag and took it home. It was 2007, maybe 2008. The whole
world listened to Britney Spears, wore low-waisted jeans and horrible eyeliner,
and waited for the first Black American president to come into office. And my
teacher carried with her the flag of a country that no longer existed. A dead
country, as if the flag were a picture of her deceased spouse.
I liked school but I didn’t like history lessons, mainly because they didn’t
make any sense. Pre-Soviet history was full of movement and spoken poetry,
pictures of a vast land, not yet uglified by the anthills of khrushcevkas. Even
simplified for children, there was solid evidence of many distinct eras, eras
very much real until the USSR. After its emergence, there was suddenly nothing,
less than nothing: mass arrests, public executions of journalists, poets and
writers, two wars where Russia was the winner and us disgracefully erased, and
then a state-sanctioned famine, long, crippling famine. Neither the books, nor
any of my history teachers called it what it was—an attempt at genocide against
the people of Kazakhstan by the Russians. And yet we were taught to be grateful.
We were taught we had to pay a price for becoming civilized.
There was no dissonance in this logic. Our white people weren’t evil like the
Europeans of the Nazi era, or the American white people of the Jim Crow South,
even though they all did the same things to us as these other white people did
to indigenous and Black people. On the contrary, our white people were our
friends, our friends who knew better, that’s all. If they had not come over and
helped us, we would still be living rancid nomadic lives, eating feces, as
Moscow-based anthropologists claimed we did. But I didn’t know anybody who ate
feces. Every building I had ever been to had a toilet. A toilet, technology
invented, incidentally, not by the Russians. For that matter, most of the
technology and cultural heritage the Russians supposedly generously shared with
us wasn’t Russian at all.
What happened in January of 2022 was the biggest revolution in the history of
Independent Kazakhstan. It happened. There was turmoil, and yes, there were
lootings and power outages that left us in the dark for days, both literally and
metaphorically. But there wasn’t death. There was the Russian army that came and
put this death upon our civil protesters.
Now, in the wake of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, Kazakhstan is on the
brink of realization, a realization bitter and painful. Not only is Russia a
colonizer, it is a colonizer unfamiliar with a White Man’s Burden. Our colonizer
didn’t leave us colorful cartoons, medieval museums, or a strong currency to
depend on. What are we left with? Dostoevsky? Tetris? The first man in space
(who, by the way, flew from a land very much Kazakh—the Baikonur spaceport right
outside my city)?
Now, when our colonizer gets sanctioned, it is our prices for goods and services
that doubles overnight. Our rent that doubles overnight. And it is the people
who took and took from us who now claim that we’d be nothing without them, as if
it is possible to be in a lesser position than Russia is. And it is the people
who took and took from us who now dare to come over and take even more. And
instead of making peace like they said they would, they made bullet holes that
are still there, right in the city center.
We are Asian now, and now we are proud of that. They still carry their sickle,
imperial and ugly, but we no longer bow down to them. We are coming back to our
language that was both written and spoken despite what Soviet anthropologists
claimed. We are coming back to our music, the one we couldn’t be starved of. We
are coming back to our literature, as we are the descendants writers they had
shot for decades. We are coming back to who we authentically are. And while
there is no way to erase centuries of blood, we have new ideas, ideas we have
discovered out there in the big, fast world, to help us understand ourselves and
act. Kazakhstan does not (yet) have its very own Clint Smith or Phil Kaye or
Toni Morrison, but there are plenty of very big shoes to fill—and I’m filling
them. Iam a petite, baby-faced woman. Many people close to me still joke about it. It
is all too familiar—every time I get ID'd at a bar (or worse, at a grocery
store), my friends snicker. Every time my little sister’s classmates ask her
which grade I’m in, she talks about it for weeks. It is simply comical when I
get excited over SpongeBob Squarepants on TV. I always argue that I am content
with a portion of my childhood engraved in me because this isn’t just my
experience—we as a country live exactly the same way.
I was born almost a decade after the collapse of the USSR, when Kazakhstan was
still new and shiny, barely stable after the 90s, the time notoriously hijacked
by those referred to as bandits and hooligans. We had to insert ourselves
somehow into the world that was—is—rapidly moving, fast-paced, creative, loud.
This insertion is a task we still haven’t quite completed, but back then it was
even more chaotic. I, an only child back then, lived in a khrushchevka with both
of my parents. The ceilings were barely taller than any adult. Four neighboring
apartments on the same floor were built during the Khruschev era, as the name
suggests. This place was where I resided most of the time. I barely went to a
kindergarten; I seemed permanently sick (I went through two major surgeries
before I was old enough to go to school) and my babysitters changed every few
months. People all around me were looking for things and places but even in
preschool it always felt to me like something was stopping us all.
After I turned seven years old, my parents decided to send me to a
Russian-speaking school, one of the oldest schools in my city. There were only a
handful of Kazakh-speaking ones anyway and they all were new—again, barely older
than the country itself. My parents, both Asian and hazardously young to be
parents in the first place, put me in a tight blouse, gave me a backpack and
dropped me off. They left me at school every morning with an unspoken
instruction to be civilRichard Jackson | The Human | Poetry
Our hot air balloon / turned into a lead ball.—Marjana Savka, Ukrainian poet
They look like a virus you’d see under a microscope.
A city flattened by artillery.
A bubble with a galaxy inside it, an amorphous shroud.
Not unlike the bubbles a child blows waiting in line for bread.
Undulating as if in waves towards an absent shore.
Carrying the driftwood of space and time.
Only seeing what the radio telescope writes on film.
Like what is hidden in the pictures from Mariupol
Beyond me, waves of forest sounds I can’t decipher.
The sky netted in the top branches.
The moles, even, afraid to show themselves for the cat.
The sun rises, scraping the top of the ridgeline.
What it sees: the 18-month-old girl, head blown open by shrapnel.
A forest of excuses. A land too far.
The smell of the fox the hunter skinned and abandoned.
The burning stumps loggers leave.
You can’t make the days follow your calendar, or
the streets follow your maps.
You can tell each country by its color.
“A country, a puddle on the map.” (Lyudmyla Khersonska)
16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were sheared off during a soccer game.
These names fall in like mortar rounds.
The wind here tonight, as if the trees were screaming.
The animal paths written through brambles.
Time drifts away in smoke.
Someone’s pajamas with cartoon unicorns in the ruins.
Each line a radio wave, a bomb’s shock wave.
Even the sky looks metallic, its stars aiming at us.
The scalloped clouds above me appearing as flack puffs.
In Mariupol they can hear the missiles overhead.
The vapor trails linger longer than their bombs.
The coyote the other day carried some small creature
in its jaws.
Just some scattered white fur after the owl dove in.
Dogs scavenging. A maternity ward become a morgue.
Death, the empty parentheses.
The empty web quivering along the trail yesterday.
Nouns with betraying modifiers.
To erase the names on the maps, to clear-cut the lives.
Now we know: Cambrian trilobites ate each other.
Twenty three species went extinct last year. We aren't
yet among them.
“A world where we once lived has left us words.” (Serhiy Zhadan)
ORCS are either eating or being eaten by galaxies like ours.
Who beyond the cosmos is watching us?
The freeze fog here has crumpled the day lilies.
The oak that fell last year is riddled with insect holes.
Kudzu is strangling our trees.
The raccoons are at the garbage. There is no food in Mariupol.
In the theater, pieces of children scattered among the dead.
“The building just folded in on itself.” A black hole.
Here, at least, the clouds can escape over the ridgeline.
ORCS are one billion light years away, further than
the Black Hole that will someday consume us.
How long does it take to consume a city?
What species does not kill its own to live? To rule?
The answers open like craters.
The last mass extinction was only the fifth to date.
Today the doomsday clock is set at under two minutes,
A disease looking for any opening.
Hearts with nothing left to pump
Someone mentioned that roots dig downwards to escape us.
The moon slowly eaten by its own shadow.
In all this, a few birds create their own space to fly through.
In the child’s drawing they look like angels.
A man with a wheelbarrow carrying away his life.
The whole city still giving birth to prayers.
Mariupol means the city of Mary.
Shrouds of smoke. Hope hides in the underbrush.
This litany of salvaged images.
How seldom we decipher the signals from our own words.
A city crumples like a map in a commander’s hand.
The day ends like a burnt-out car.
Editor’s Note
Making sense of the modern world involves facing it, stripping it bare of
pretense and understanding the web of links that binds us underneath all that
hardship. In “Odd Radio Circles”, Jackson views the world through both satellite
and microscope, binding the macro and micro and tracing the paths from ourselves
to the fractures in our humanity because it is not until we’ve driven our
knuckles to the foundation that we can hope to clear enough to build anew.Our hot air balloon / turned into a lead ball.—Marjana Savka, Ukrainian poet
They look like a virus you’d see under a microscope.
A city flattened by artillery.
A bubble with a galaxy inside it, an amorphous shroud.
Not unlike the bubbles a child blows waiting in line for bread.
Undulating as if in waves towards an absent shore.
Carrying the driftwood of space and time.
Only seeing what the radio telescope writes on film.
Like what is hidden in the pictures from Mariupol
Beyond me, waves of forest sounds I can’t decipher.
The sky netted in the top branches.
The moles, even, afraid to show themselves for the cat.
The sun rises, scraping the top of the ridgeline.
What it sees: the 18-month-old girl, head blown open by shrapnel.
A forest of excuses. A land too far.
The smell of the fox the hunter skinned and abandoned.
The burning stumps loggers leave.
You can’t make the days follow your calendar, or
the streets follow your maps.
You can tell each country by its color.
“A country, a puddle on the map.” (Lyudmyla Khersonska)
16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were sheared off during a soccer game.
These names fall in like mortar rounds.
The wind here tonight, as if the trees were screaming.
The animal paths written through brambles.
Time drifts away in smoke.
Someone’s pajamas with cartoon unicorns in the ruins.
Each line a radio wave, a bomb’s shock wave.
Even the sky looks metallic, its stars aiming at us.
The scalloped clouds above me appearing as flack puffs.
In Mariupol they can hear the missiles overhead.
The vapor trails linger longer than their bombs.
The coyote the other day carried some small creature
in its jaws.
Just some scattered white fur after the owl dove in.
Dogs scavenging. A maternity ward become a morgue.
Death, the empty parentheses.
The empty web quivering along the trail yesterday.
Nouns with betraying modifiers.
To erase the names on the maps, to clear-cut the lives.
Now we know: Cambrian trilobites ate each otChristian Phillip Swafford | Artwork
New Year's at the Church (2021) Artist’s Note
For a time, I was a part of an art collective that ran an enormous DIY house
venue. We had rented a whole-ass church in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of
Chicago. For 5 years, we hosted all manner of hopefully of-age folks, elbowing
for their share of youthful experience. On New Year's Day in 2017, we reached
our apex, with 400 people crammed inside this large carpeted room that would be
better served for a potluck dinner for some Aunties' social club doing the
things that 20 somethings delinquents have been doing for as long as we can
remember (read: 1950, probably). A picture was taken that night from the stage
which captured the size and energy of that crowd. Eventually this picture would
be in the police report that our landlord referenced when he kicked us out. It
was a fair court. I had a simple plan, to paint this photograph in some large
format. I chose a canvas I’d already filled with an abstract layer that in
retrospect felt predestined to serve as the base. I projected the photograph
onto the yellow and purple checkered canvas, and I knew right from the jump that
the cheap projector and even cheaper bulb left me barely able to see a thing. I
had genuinely wrestled with my artistic moral compass over using a projector:
Was I "cheating"?
I knew the way I’d resolve this: I would make it difficult, I would make it a
high-wire event. The painting would have to be made in one sitting and painted
fast. I refused to properly mark the projector's relation to the wall, or the
canvas' relation to the floor. I did not secure anything. A bump into any
physical object would throw the whole event into chaos. I sat the tubes of paint
at my feet to avoid movement and minimize chances to bump anything out of place.
I poured an indiscriminate amount of any one color onto the palate then tried to
find a projected object to duplicate. Hair line. PAINT. That's a face. PAINT
FACE. What is that? I don't know, paint it anyway.
I used up all of whatever color I had poured before I added more to the mix. At
times, I did not know what color I was using. I couldn’t tell apart the color
from the base layer, the color being projected, and the color that I was
currently painting. I knew only one goal: everything must be painted that night.
I felt myself losing steam, but I sensed the finish line. I love how the last
figures I rendered turned out; they were painted so fast that only a faint
spirit exists, which falls into the vastness of the crowd.New Year's at the Church (2021) Artist’s Note
For a time, I was a part of an art collective that ran an enormous DIY house
venue. We had rented a whole-ass church in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of
Chicago. For 5 years, we hosted all manner of hopefully of-age folks, elbowing
for their share of youthful experience. On New Year's Day in 2017, we reached
our apex, with 400 people crammed inside this large carpeted room that would be
better served for a potluck dinner for some Aunties' social club doing the
things that 20 somethings delinquents have been doing for as long as we can
remember (read: 1950, probably). A picture was taken that night from the stage
which captured the size and energy of that crowd. Eventually this picture would
be in the police report that our landlord referenced when he kicked us out. It
was a fair court. I had a simple plan, to paint this photograph in some large
format. I chose a canvas I’d already filled with an abstract layer that in
retrospect felt predestined to serve as the base. I projected the photograph
onto the yellow and purple checkered canvas, and I knew right from the jump that
the cheap projector and even cheaper bulb left me barely able to see a thing. I
had genuinely wrestled with my artistic moral compass over using a projector:
Was I "cheating"?
I knew the way I’d resolve this: I would make it difficult, I would make it a
high-wire event. The painting would have to be made in one sitting and painted
fast. I refused to properly mark the projector's relation to the wall, or the
canvas' relation to the floor. I did not secure anything. A bump into any
physical object would throw the whole event into chaos. I sat the tubes of paint
at my feet to avoid movement and minimize chances to bump anything out of place.
I poured an indiscriminate amount of any one color onto the palate then tried to
find a projected object to duplicate. Hair line. PAINT. That's a face. PAINT
FACE. What is that? I don't know, paint it anyway.
ICourtney W. Brothers | Artwork
Trace no. 3 (2022) | ink & watercolor Artist’s Note
In this piece, I wanted to evoke the feeling of walking into the dark woods,
retracing your steps, looking for the monsters you once ran from but don’t fear
now.Trace no. 3 (2022) | ink & watercolor Artist’s Note
In this piece, I wanted to evoke the feeling of walking into the dark woods,
retracing your steps, looking for the monsters you once ran from but don’t fear
now.Christian J. Collier | Poetry
Poet’s Note
Thanks to the artist Mark Bradford and his process in his work, my own writing
process changed. I no longer write in a linear fashion, and I've been much more
invested the past few years in getting interesting text down on the page and
then figuring out surprising ways into and through poems. This pursuit has not
only allowed me to generate poems that fascinate and engage me, but it has also
granted me the ability to interrogate and talk to and about my ghosts and
family. Poet’s Note
Thanks to the artist Mark Bradford and his process in his work, my own writing
process changed. I no longer write in a linear fashion, and I've been much more
invested the past few years in getting interesting text down on the page and
then figuring out surprising ways into and through poems. This pursuit has not
only allowed me to generate poems that fascinate and engage me, but it has also
granted me the ability to interrogate and talk to and about my ghosts and
family.Christian J. Collier | Poetry
Poet’s Note
What drew me to this poem was the two conflicting desires: one, "I want to
believe you suffer no more", and two "I want a sign you still exist". The former
can only come from the rational finality of death, and the latter can only come
from the irrational leap of belief. The latter is certainly more "beautiful”,
but the former is easier to accept and move forward from. We just get tempted
towards the beautiful rather than the real. To me, the 'problem' is that
temptation - and recognizing that as a 'problem' implies a choice in the speaker
to ultimately deal with their loss in the rational way. Poet’s Note
What drew me to this poem was the two conflicting desires: one, "I want to
believe you suffer no more", and two "I want a sign you still exist". The former
can only come from the rational finality of death, and the latter can only come
from the irrational leap of belief. The latter is certainly more "beautiful”,
but the former is easier to accept and move forward from. We just get tempted
towards the beautiful rather than the real. To me, the 'problem' is that
temptation - and recognizing that as a 'problem' implies a choice in the speaker
to ultimately deal with their loss in the rational way.Victoria Juharyan | Poetry
To Platonov...
They said you liked simple people
And complicated machines.
They said that trains had sung
Your lullabies for you and that
You were afraid of women,
Who could not think…or
Were not enough manly.
Your hands…Your hands were so
Manly. So Soviet that somehow I felt
like
I could have seen you –
Extending one’s
Gaze just a few decades is not that
hard:
Though a hardship.
You seem too close. As if we were
separated
Not by six degrees but two decrees of
isolation.
Your eyes after all belied your hands.
Those belonged to a poet
And not a proletariat
(though an intelligent one,
as they described you).
It’s very strange this chemistry
Through ages.
Sages speaking to me through a tapestry
Of epiphanic gages
That is now my mind
Slipping away
Before I could reply.
But I will say this much:
I like simple machines
And complicated people.
(2013)
photo of the author taken by Elina Akselrud Poet’s Note
“To Platonov” is dedicated to the Russian poet, playwright, and philosopher
Andrey Platonov, a favorite of Hemingway’s. I wrote it in 2013 after watching a
documentary on Platonov to understand why a friend would associate me with
Platonov and his somewhat romantic perception of life and nature. In 2020, this
poem was shared by my advisor Caryl Emerson at Platonov reading group at
Princeton University, where it was composed.To Platonov...
They said you liked simple people
And complicated machines.
They said that trains had sung
Your lullabies for you and that
You were afraid of women,
Who could not think…or
Were not enough manly.
Your hands…Your hands were so
Manly. So Soviet that somehow I felt
like
I could have seen you –
Extending one’s
Gaze just a few decades is not that
hard:
Though a hardship.
You seem too close. As if we were
separated
Not by six degrees but two decrees of
isolation.
Your eyes after all belied your hands.
Those belonged to a poet
And not a proletariat
(though an intelligent one,
as they described you).
It’s very strange this chemistry
Through ages.
Sages speaking to me through a tapestry
Of epiphanic gages
That is now my mind
Slipping away
Before I could reply.
But I will say this much:
I like simple machines
And complicated people.
(2013)
photo of the author taken by Elina Akselrud Poet’s Note
“To Platonov” is dedicated to the Russian poet, playwright, and philosopher
Andrey Platonov, a favorite of Hemingway’s. I wrote it in 2013 after watching a
documentary on Platonov to understand why a friend would associate me with
Platonov and his somewhat romantic perception of life and nature. In 2020, this
poem was shared by my advisor Caryl Emerson at Platonov reading group at
Princeton University, where it was composed.Victoria Juharyan | Poetry
I envy the confidence of ignorance,
The stillness of growing grass,
The rustle of dead leaves.
The majesty of trees succumbing
To the changing seasons with
No melancholia.
I envy me too, if I look at myself as I look at things
I cannot conceive. So full of life and energy,
It seems. Some strange thirst for life and death.
For I can’t resist the changing cycles
Either. But I am great only as an object.
My subjectivity haunts me,
Disturbs every sublimity. I wish I could
Perceive without perceiving my perception...
Maybe that’s what trees do?
(2019)
photo from the author Poet’s Note
“I envy the confidence of ignorance” was written in Maine, after an invitational
lecture titled “Problems of Desire: Self-consciousness and Self-Narration in
Late Tolstoy” I gave at Bowdoin College in 2019. The beautiful autumn nature of
New England was very much an inspiration along with Hegel, Tolstoy, Heidegger
and concerns of self-awareness.I envy the confidence of ignorance,
The stillness of growing grass,
The rustle of dead leaves.
The majesty of trees succumbing
To the changing seasons with
No melancholia.
I envy me too, if I look at myself as I look at things
I cannot conceive. So full of life and energy,
It seems. Some strange thirst for life and death.
For I can’t resist the changing cycles
Either. But I am great only as an object.
My subjectivity haunts me,
Disturbs every sublimity. I wish I could
Perceive without perceiving my perception...
Maybe that’s what trees do?
(2019)
photo from the author Poet’s Note
“I envy the confidence of ignorance” was written in Maine, after an invitational
lecture titled “Problems of Desire: Self-consciousness and Self-Narration in
Late Tolstoy” I gave at Bowdoin College in 2019. The beautiful autumn nature of
New England was very much an inspiration along with Hegel, Tolstoy, Heidegger
and concerns of self-awareness.Victoria Juharyan | Poetry
I dance Flamenco in a Slavic dress,
I say my prayers in languages that
Prattle.
Some say, never forget where you came from.
Some say, know where you're going.
Some say, do both.
That's easy. Sometimes.
The difficulty lies in how to be.
Who am I? What am I?
I dance... I dance...Between rites and rituals, perhaps rapturously we'll pass
the time that ticks like a
bomb...
Will I defuse? Illuminate?
(2015)
photo from the author Poet’s Note
During graduate school at Princeton, I took Flamenco classes after two failed
attempts of learning to dance tango as each time I would be told by the teacher
that as I woman I cannot lead; Flamenco gave me more freedom as well as space.
“I dance Flamenco in a Slavic Dress” is also about many cultures and languages
that can coexist within a single consciousness and beyond. The poem steps into
moods that gesture towards phenomenology and existentialism, questions of
idealism and theories of the mind.I dance Flamenco in a Slavic dress,
I say my prayers in languages that
Prattle.
Some say, never forget where you came from.
Some say, know where you're going.
Some say, do both.
That's easy. Sometimes.
The difficulty lies in how to be.
Who am I? What am I?
I dance... I dance...Between rites and rituals, perhaps rapturously we'll pass
the time that ticks like a
bomb...
Will I defuse? Illuminate?
(2015)
photo from the author Poet’s Note
During graduate school at Princeton, I took Flamenco classes after two failed
attempts of learning to dance tango as each time I would be told by the teacher
that as I woman I cannot lead; Flamenco gave me more freedom as well as space.
“I dance Flamenco in a Slavic Dress” is also about many cultures and languages
that can coexist within a single consciousness and beyond. The poem steps into
moods that gesture towards phenomenology and existentialism, questions of
idealism and theories of the mind.Sebastian Matthews | Poetry
Let’s talk about,
the giant tube, the ways
& all the permutations
to keep one’s cool.
& by goes through
& by cool I mean
screaming until the lady
I don't know where the idea
originated, but turns out
Or so says the lady
& I start sliding in.
a loud series of bangs
a clockwork-orangian
rhythms pulsed into
volume-one series
between brief,
of sound wash, as if
& precipitated by curious
Add to this
locking you in
slowly transforming into
for the gestalt of it
of it. Nor
it out or ignore
rising within my body.
playoff race standings
childhood homes
respectively)—& started
Thought that led to
which walked me
of hyperventilation.
counting minutes,
Which got me
where I was conveyor-
to get an IV hook up.
the technician before
Back inside.
There was one interval
matched my counting
for a minute, minute & a half
encompassing my breaths,
me off center, sending me
of disembodied confusion.
…47, 48, 49…
pulling myself to 60
then jumping back
on home, where morning
& the moon rotated
But done what? Piece of cake
It wasn’t until I am back
he last time I had to resort
was when I was stuck
of a crashed car, waiting
To be pulled out of the car
bound for the hospital.
& the MRI
though you couldn’t have
& who knows
it will be. Either way,
this time
now that I am free
torture gets articulated
one goes through
& by one I mean me
I could say endures.
not losing my shit
comes get me out.
it'd only take 15 minutes
it will be more like 45-50
as she pushes the button
& what was said to be
& alarm bells in reality are
array of techno-jack-hammer
the brain at maximum
switched out for another
saidstically calming periods
held up lightly by clouds
animal-in-the-wall knocks.
the tight squeeze, the headgear
the warm blanket
a hair suit. I was not ready
the pure sensory overload
my inability to drown
the cacophony, nor the panic
I ditched all the stratagems—
tournament seedings
& young adult rentals (10 & 10
counting my breaths.
too-deep breaths
to the precipice edge
Nothing to do but start
1 to 60, in 5-minute blocks.
to the 30-minute mark
belted back into the light
15 minutes to go, chirped
disappearing from view.
Back to counting.
where the cosmic pulse
& so I rode its wave
before it subsumed me
erasing numbers, knocking
down a rabbit hole
Above, I saw cartoon script
I reached up & grabbed hold
resting on its wobbly platform
into the minutes, riding them
light rose over the horizon-line
out of view. I’d done it!
a friend had told me.
in the car that I realize
to counting my breaths
behind the steering wheel
for the EMTs to arrive.
to be placed on the helicopter
Then, it was life or death.
just diagnostic test
convinced me that in there.
maybe it was. Maybe
I’ll be ready
to the best of my ability.
Poet’s Note
I often write poems straight out of experience, as was the case with "MRI."
Directly after leaving the doctor's office, I went to a local taqueria and
ordered some tacos and a beer. I pulled out a pen and opened the book I had with
me and scribbled out the poem on its blank back pages. I have since worked on
the poem, but 90% of what you see here is what I captured at that lunch counter.
The poem's structure came to me as I was typing the poem out later that day.
Let’s talk about,
the giant tube, the ways
& all the permutations
to keep one’s cool.
& by goes through
& by cool I mean
screaming until the lady
I don't know where the idea
originated, but turns out
Or so says the lady
& I start sliding in.
a loud series of bangs
a clockwork-orangian
rhythms pulsed into
volume-one series
between brief,
of sound wash, as if
& precipitated by curious
Add to this
locking you in
slowly transforming into
for the gestalt of it
of it. Nor
it out or ignore
rising within my body.
playoff race standings
childhood homes
respectively)—& started
Thought that led to
which walked me
of hyperventilation.
counting minutes,
Which got me
where I was conveyor-
to get an IV hook up.
the technician before
Back inside.
There was one interval
matched my counting
for a minute, minute & a half
encompassing my breaths,
me off center, sending me
of disembodied confusion.
…47, 48, 49…
pulling myself to 60
then jumping back
on home, where morning
& the moon rotated
But done what? Piece of cake
It wasn’t until I am back
he last time I had to resort
was when I was stuck
of a crashed car, waiting
To be pulled out of the car
bound for the hospital.
& the MRI
though you couldn’t have
& who knows
it will be. Either way,
this time
now that I am free
torture gets articulated
one goes through
& by one I mean me
I could say endures.
not losing my shit
comes get me out.
it'd only take 15 minutes
it will be more like 45-50
as she pushes the button
& what was said to be
& alarm bells in reality are
array of techno-jack-hammer
the brain at maximum
switched out for another
saidstically calming periods
held up lightly by clouds
animal-in-the-wall knocks.
the tight squeeze, the headgear
the warm blanket
a hair suit. I was not ready
the pure sensory overload
my inability to drown
the cacophony, nor the panic
I ditched all the stratagems—
tournament seedings
& young adult rentals (10 & 10
counting my breaths.
too-deep breaths
to the precipice edge
Nothing to Isabella Bruzzese | Artwork
Self-Portrait (2021) | graphite on paper Artist’s Note
This piece is a scan of a graphite self-portrait I completed in August of 2021.
I’ve been interested in self-portraiture since I was very young—in recent years,
I’ve found the practice both healing and horrifying, as it allows me to
investigate/illustrate the often distorted perceptions I have of my body.
Self-Portrait (2021) | graphite on paper Artist’s Note
This piece is a scan of a graphite self-portrait I completed in August of 2021.
I’ve been interested in self-portraiture since I was very young—in recent years,
I’ve found the practice both healing and horrifying, as it allows me to
investigate/illustrate the often distorted perceptions I have of my body.Brynna Hall | The True | Poetry
i.
dawn under redwoods looks like
deep night;
any change of light is obscured by
one thousand years
of silent perseverance–
burn marks slashed across maroon trunks,
the patient stalwart grows ever upward
between pushing modernity
distant whispers of traffic
and the rushing pacific
a brother in solemn certainty.
dawn under redwoods,
when owls and jays,
once a day,
harmonize.
tucked in hooded shadows,
mournful baritones of the Great Horned God
sings itself into a sunrise slumber;
the last stretch
next to the glowing moon over the western pines
of night.
Steller's Jays
tear neon blue cuts across a lavender sky
and promise the forest of the rising splendor –
shrill cries echo through
a kaleidoscope of branches,
‘the day!’ they call, ‘it comes!’
the sky moves slowly:
black,
grey,
abalones on the beach at dusk,
the innermost petal on a lilac,
the smell of the first bloom of tea roses,
children’s laughter,
and finally,
blue.
ii.
at the edge of the earth, God put a patio.
there, the pacific is the width of the world
and the sun bleeds on cresting waves
with such painful intensity
that I want to look away but
I do not.
cragged cliffs pour themselves
into the splintered sea,
like a call to prayer at high noon;
turquoise rips across kelpy darkness
and the sky pales beside
the thrusting waves -
the sacrificial singer of earth’s loudest song,
gregorian chants in salt
and brine.
overhead,
a shadow
passes,
the sun darkens
to pay his respects;
have you ever looked directly at God?
the wings alone might throw us into eternal night;
whispers of extinction,
spectres of lead and steel
smell of rust and blood; create
the shape of destruction;
the shape of man;
the California Condor
soars westward and, for a moment,
silences even the waves.
Poet’s Note
The California Condor once flew in the thousands across the Pacific coast of the
United States. But they were placed on the endangered species list in 1967,
largely due to lead poisoning from irresponsible hunting and improper disposal
of animal carcasses. In 1980, there were fewer than ten California Condors left
in the world. After one of the most successful species revitalization projects
in history, today over 300 Condors fly along the California coast. On Spring
Equinox, at the edge of a cliff in Big Sur, I saw one flying in the wild. I’ve
never been so close (at hundreds of feet away!) to something so nearly lost from
all of us; mere traces of this species are still all that remain, and yet it
remains; it flies, in spite of us all. This poem is my homage to a creature and
a place that are stark, vicious, otherworldly, and yet on the edge, existing in
fragments of what they once were, as so many of us are.i.
dawn under redwoods looks like
deep night;
any change of light is obscured by
one thousand years
of silent perseverance–
burn marks slashed across maroon trunks,
the patient stalwart grows ever upward
between pushing modernity
distant whispers of traffic
and the rushing pacific
a brother in solemn certainty.
dawn under redwoods,
when owls and jays,
once a day,
harmonize.
tucked in hooded shadows,
mournful baritones of the Great Horned God
sings itself into a sunrise slumber;
the last stretch
next to the glowing moon over the western pines
of night.
Steller's Jays
tear neon blue cuts across a lavender sky
and promise the forest of the rising splendor –
shrill cries echo through
a kaleidoscope of branches,
‘the day!’ they call, ‘it comes!’
the sky moves slowly:
black,
grey,
abalones on the beach at dusk,
the innermost petal on a lilac,
the smell of the first bloom of tea roses,
children’s laughter,
and finally,
blue.
ii.
at the edge of the earth, God put a patio.
there, the pacific is the width of the world
and the sun bleeds on cresting waves
with such painful intensity
that I want to look away but
I do not.
cragged cliffs pour themselves
into the splintered sea,
like a call to prayer at high noon;
turquoise rips across kelpy darkness
and the sky pales beside
the thrusting waves -
the sacrificial singer of earth’s loudest song,
gregorian chants in salt
and brine.
overhead,
a shadow
passes,
the sun darkens
to pay his respects;
have you ever looked directly at God?
the wings alone might throw us into eternal night;
whispers of extinction,
spectres of lead and steel
smell of rust and blood; create
the shape of destruction;
the shape of man;
the California Condor
soars westward and, for a moment,
silences even the waves.
Poet’s Note
The California Condor once flew in the thousands across the Pacific coast of the
United States. But they were placed on the endangered species list in 1967,
largely due to lead poisoning from irresponsible hunting anBrooke Bourgeois | Cartoon
Artist’s Note
Brooke is a cartoonist and illustrator who primarily finds inspiration at the
intersection of unlikely themes. She is constantly ‘searching’ for jokes that
are specifically suited to visual anchors, and this often involves re-imagining
historical periods, fairy tale characters, and even cartoon tropes. In the
collection of cartoons she has provided for this issue, she explores this meta
theme of searching in her practice while each individual cartoon employs
searching on a micro level somehow: searching the internet, searching for love,
searching for a way out of desert island, searching for purpose. Artist’s Note
Brooke is a cartoonist and illustrator who primarily finds inspiration at the
intersection of unlikely themes. She is constantly ‘searching’ for jokes that
are specifically suited to visual anchors, and this often involves re-imagining
historical periods, fairy tale characters, and even cartoon tropes. In the
collection of cartoons she has provided for this issue, she explores this meta
theme of searching in her practice while each individual cartoon employs
searching on a micro level somehow: searching the internet, searching for love,
searching for a way out of desert island, searching for purpose.Lisa McCarty | Photography
Artist’s Note
The images featured in this issue are from my series Transcendental Concord
(Radius Books, 2018). The series is a visual interpretation of
transcendentalism: a literary, philosophical, and social movement that developed
from a community in Concord, Massachusetts. Through this project—which involved
equal parts photographing, walking, and reading—I sought to pay homage to the
transcendentalists and make images that reflect their philosophy. Over the
course of a year, I explored the landscape that inspired them as well as where
they lived and wrote.
While on these pilgrimages, I photographed specific places in Concord referenced
in transcendentalist writings. I photographed simply, wandering on foot with a
film camera. I photographed deliberately, with reverence toward the natural
world, observing variations large and small in the environment. And I
photographed experimentally, incorporating long exposures as well as camera
movement from photographing while walking. Although I never expected to see
exactly what the transcendentalists saw, I hoped to feel something of what they
felt, searching the landscape for traces of history and a sense of
interconnection. Artist’s Note
The images featured in this issue are from my series Transcendental Concord
(Radius Books, 2018). The series is a visual interpretation of
transcendentalism: a literary, philosophical, and social movement that developed
from a community in Concord, Massachusetts. Through this project—which involved
equal parts photographing, walking, and reading—I sought to pay homage to the
transcendentalists and make images that reflect their philosophy. Over the
course of a year, I explored the landscape that inspired them as well as where
they lived and wrote.
While on these pilgrimages, I photographed specific places in Concord referenced
in transcendentalist writings. I photographed simply, wandering on foot with a
film camera. I photographed deliberately, with reverence toward the natural
world, observing variations large and small in the environment. And I
photographed experimentally, incorporating long exposures as well as camera
movement from photographing while walking. Although I never expected to see
exactly what the transcendentalists saw, I hoped to feel something of what they
felt, searching the landscape for traces of history and a sense of
interconnection.