Poetry |
“Farmer / Videogame” & “Translator (Delivery Truck Driver)”
“I was ashamed / to need my co-worker Adam’s // help lifting cab from chassis. First / the transmission fluid flowed / dark red. Then the gaskets // blew …”
Literature in Translation |
from Study of Sorrows: “This Evening,” “[After Illness, my earlocks”], “[Who planted that banana tree”] & “Feelings in Spring”
“Should I take a walk / somewhere, like those happy, healthy people? // Let me wait for the sun to dissipate the mist and see / whether this is really a good day.”
Literature in Translation |
from Transparencies: “To Know How to Approach,” “1980,” “Riverbed” & “Dorsoduro”
“To know how to approach. / How we see the riddle of distance / from here to where the places we’ve lived thicken. / I summon the islands of heather and ice / the Atlantic dawn / a plane in ascent / hard verses of gulls like fine chains.”
Poetry |
“Common Ground,” “Eating Greenland” & “Thirst”
“I thought I was finished with beauty, / having shed — given away, or sold — so much / and committed myself // to necessary objects only.”
Fiction |
“Open Mic Night”
“She had to catch it, both for its own sake — creatures like that couldn’t survive in strange habitats — and for hers, since she didn’t belong here, and so she must have something to do with the bird, another out-of-place stranger, probably in trouble. How did she get here?
Lyric Prose |
“Spare Change”
“She’s standing by a column. Sole of her right foot on the wall. Blue jeans, black hoodie, café con leche skin. Could have been my younger sister, if I had one. Do you have spare change?”
Essay |
“Duglegur”
“‘Sóley,’ she says, which I understand to mean creeping buttercup. She tells me I can pull them out. Their spindly stems branch off in every direction.”
Poetry |
“Arrival Day” & “The Future”
“Here is / the bridge // they said / they’d burn // when they / got to it …
Literature in Translation |
from All That Dies in April, a novel by Mariana Travacio
“I’ve been telling him we need to leave, but he doesn’t want to. He’s attached to this land, he says we were born here and we should die here, too. But we’re the only ones left, I tell him.”
Poetry |
“Redwood”
“… and in ten million or so years / I might reach a tablet / inscribed with the poems of Enheduana; / and in another stretch / a bark-cliff-edge leading inside the mind / of Dante.”
Essay |
“My Mother’s Fingers”
“As I learn about her incarceration during World War II, I better understand the anger that she expressed when pain and dysfunction prevented her from sewing and gardening.”
Poetry |
“Mother As Bird” & “Red Tricycle”
“Reflections of clouds and trees / shone on its silver handlebars but only for a moment / before they’d slide away …”
Literature in Translation |
from One Year and Three Months: “The Mystery and the Secret,” “The Truth of Fiction” & “One Year and Three Months”
“I watch her in the mirror / as she arranges her hair / like someone lining up at the boarding gate / in search of her destiny. / I don’t know what her patience promises, / nor what my silence holds.”
Poetry |
“The Cryptid” & “The Loons”
“Drinks blood thinking it wine, / drinks wine thinking it dreams. / Its eyes are tattooed globes. / The cryptid sees through a thousand eyes hidden by fur.”
Lyric Prose |
“Box of Life”
“I slid the spoon in and took my first mouthful — and I froze. I was no longer in our kitchen but standing in the sunny piano room of my mother’s small shingled house on Cape Cod.”