Would any of us childhood pals have stuck together, that old tape, if not for distance? My friends, flamed up in meth or psychosis, I saw them rot, I untethered myself.
A rat fleeing the burning ship. The ship playing against the aurora on the horizon.
Easy to think of the ideal bonds when we were a thousand miles apart, not stumbling in front of each other or stealing lovers or dorking out most likely.
In videotape, all the movies we made, memorialized for only a couple decades at best, before all the pieces of the mechanism rot, become useless, scattered magnetic fragments of metal on a stretched piece of tape. It doesn’t matter if anybody watches them or not.
Time still bites its chunks out, the mold seeps into the drawer, the closet, under the bed.
Friends, who needs em? Always demanding, ladling over with emotions.
Woods in the back dirt, our friend telling us we’d find him hanging there one day from the top of the tree. He was nine, we all were, did I cut him out, the poison, is it ignoble to get the fuse into another room, to smother it with metals, to avoid any brunt force, bruise or cut?
I’m a lil coward.
I, polite Canadian, but emotions, self hurt, should be swallowed, forced down, a choke or bad gulp of air.
I’m… here if you need me, but please don’t.
I’ll answer the calls on my phone, but I’d rather a text message. I’d rather silence.
My friends, carry my weight, my impending doom, my paper cut wrist, oh!
earth
Fragments. Fools’ gold, or is it fool’s gold? Frottage. Front roads. Free lunches*. Feelings, nothing more than. Fleeings, in my best moments. Foil wrappers from sandwiches good and bad. Flan, the precarious, the delicate. Fucking. Flames. Fringe benefits. Foliage, or is it foilage? Fat chances. Feet, so many of them! Flagellations. Fridges. Friggin refs! Fun, some. Feed bags. Fie, fie, go fie yourself. Films, though most aren’t film anymore. Fabulists. French fries, French toast. Federales. Funk on the good speakers. Friends and foes. Freezes. Flunking out. Finks. Flags, they’ve been at half mast since at least 9/11. Flowers, gotta love em. Flowers, oh, right, allergies. Famine on the border of every feast. Freaks, no one I love more. Fresh produce. Fresh air*. Fives, if you can spare em. Fonts. Flanks. Frogs. Frogger. Friends with benefits. Friends with detriments. Frostbite. Flocks above us. Funerals below us. Fairies. Flub tapes. Freedom fries, Freedom toast. Fascism. Fig Newtons. Fronts, frocks. Fromage even. Flo from those tv ads, she seems like a nice actress who’s dedicated her career to… safety. Free me, give me safety. Filet the capitalists, flagellate the fascists. Flank Steaks. Farewells. F minuses. Faculty meetings. F minus minuses. FBI. Faps. Frat bros. Faberge eggs, though I’ve never seen one. Food, including fudge. Frontiers, what’s even left? Feldspar. Fumigation. Farm subsidies. Family farms (imagination). Facts, falsehoods, fumes through the grates. Festering wounds. For sure. Fellas, is it gay to fill your plate? Facing the end, the trick is we always are. Full houses. Foul odors. Fists. Faces through the window, you’re on the third floor. Figures. Fussy little so and so. Fashion! Fetch! Feel me? Fingers under the wheel. Factory farms, what’s a life. Fizzy drinks. Fanta, Faygo. Foreclosures. Foul balls. Fundraising, if you can. Fives, if you can spare em. Falcons. Functions for work, church, township. Florida baby! Florala. Fast cars, fast women. Faith. Fathers of invention. Foibles. French Polynesia. Framework. Fridays, fuck yeah! Frodo from that book and or film. Fozzie Bear, too. Fasting for religious purposes, or surgery. Favorites. Fogs. Fondness. Fever. Falconers, like they had anything to do with making falcons. Fangs deep in my wrist. Firing squads. Flies. Famished! Fungi at the party. Fungi causing sepsis. Flashes when the sun sets over the ocean, in the pan. Floods, forest fires. Funnel clouds. Fabric softeners, use a couple at once. Fantasies in moonlight. Flickering, the fire behind the film. Family plots. Fiddles (violins with character). Fathers in the streets. Flames licking the box store (violence with character). Fondling. Fragging. Fredrick Douglass. Fea, a punk band from San Antonio. Fear. Four corners. Forest animals. Foxes. Fur. Fracking, like licking your piece’s bowl. Frankly speaking, file cabinets. Fleas. Follicles. Fond-du-lac. Finches. Flinches. Fixtures coming off the ceilings, do we fix them now or wait for them to fall?
hell
New Yorkers in the unemployment line telling me they saw death, a man jumped from a building, hit the ground in front of them, they dodged the body and bought a bacon egg and cheese.
I don’t buy it, a bloodstain to outlast the self.
The city a shadow burned onto the wall, the tough façade only icing.
Pawprints on the 4000 year old tablet, a recipe for beans.
I’m afraid, am not tough, the possum splatted in the road makes me cry.
Give me a hand across the street, sonny, give me lethal aid.
I’ll scream fuck you! out the car window but I mean please, if it’s no bother, could you fuck you.
The Left Hand of Darkness being read by what I presume is a corpse through the bluetooth speakers in the barber shop.
The right hand does… only good?
I lived in Queens and drove relentlessly to Brooklyn, The City ™, etc.
A little polished medal to live in NYC like being in a censored high school play. I helped paint the back drop, I retreated during the pandemic when sirens swam the air and we pretended to be cool with the refrigerated trucks full of corpses.
Anyone can live in New York.
If I could fake it here I could fake it anywhere.
The cold New Yorker a part people play, no one more ready to burst into tears, people in their 50s still calling their parents baby names. Hi mommy, hi daddy.
Glenn Shaheen is the author of four books. He is the President of the Radius of Arab American Writers and teaches at Prairie View A&M University.
A BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO shows a dark-skinned baby propped up on a wooden bench, like a pew or perhaps an institutionalized chair, the type that can be easily wiped clean. The child’s black hair is cropped short, the bangs uneven and her chubby arms hang straight by her sides. She looks doll-like, in a white dress—perhaps a christening dress—and old-fashioned baby shoes. Her black eyes are averted to one side, as if there’s more than one person in the room, or maybe is frightened. She is frowning, perhaps on the verge of tears.
I know the picture was taken at the North York Children’s Aid Society because the date and location are handwritten on the back of the photo. The report detailing my adoptive history states when I was eleven months my foster mother died. It’s an undocumented mystery where I ended up for the next seven months, before transracial adoptive proceedings began with the Gilmour’s. Perhaps wherever I was, with whoever I was, added to a distancing from myself, not just in regards to ethnicity but also in how I attached to others, thus cultivating my lifelong search for connection and belonging.
SNAPSHOT
A BROWN-SKINNED GIRL is standing stiffly in front of a red brick school with her long legs spread wide and her gangly arms hanging at her sides, fingers turned inwards. She is slim, some would say skinny, and wears a boyish red checked shirt over her flat chest, tucked into blue jeans with a low waist. Her shiny black hair with straight bangs is cut to shoulder length and her head is tilted to the side with a half-smile. Her almost-black eyes seem to follow you.
Growing up, I was often the only non-white person in the small towns where we lived. When I was six or seven, my adoptive parents told me I had been born in Toronto and my ‘original’ parents were from the West Indies. I had eagerly run downstairs to find West Indies on our world globe and mistakenly thought my ethnicity was West Indian. At the time, I didn’t know the difference between ethnicity and country of origin.
When I rode the school bus to high school, a teenage boy regularly spat at me, his spittle hitting my jacket and slowly gyrating to the floor. Every school day my stomach lurched when I climbed the bus steps and stumbled to my seat. The bus driver and other students ignored the whole thing. Maybe they didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t.
SNAPSHOT
TWO PEOPLE STAND BEHIND A WOODEN TABLE on which sits a small square cake with congratulations written in pink icing. The man, his black hair swooped back, is tall and wears a smoky blue suit with red and navy striped tie. His gleam-white smile stretches from ear to ear revealing two perfectly molded dimples. Long tapering fingers rest on top of the woman’s hand, pressing an ornate knife against the cake. The young woman stands slightly in front and wears a lacy top with matching long white skirt. Her smile isn’t as big, looks hesitant, certainly wispy, but her almost-black eyes look hopeful. The photo isn’t great, the light behind, too bright, showing their skin as deep brown, his almost black. The bystanders look like wraiths peering from the shadows.
I married Reverend Sanjay Jaikaran at the Peoples Church in Toronto, coincidentally, the same weekend my ex-boyfriend—my first love who I still loved—complied with his family’s wishes and travelled to mainland China to marry a woman chosen by his traditional Chinese parents.
My adoptive parents had braved the Toronto traffic to attend our small wedding, which was difficult for them being from smaller places and of the age of most grandparents. Growing up, my adoptive mother would often imply that white was better. “Look how white your hands are!” after I had a bath or, “a true Canadian is white” or say I looked too Indian when I tied my hair back. They thought the marriage was a mistake. Sanjay was too foreign, too dark, too unknown.
When Sanjay with his deep brown skin said he and his family were South Asian from Guyana, I decided to adopt his cultural and racial heritage as my own. They were immigrants with brown skin. They had understood why one stays silent when they should really shout. My heart, both broken and full, said “yes”. I had found my people at last.
“I’m no longer alone,” I said to Sanjay. “I’ll be a Jaikaran now.”
SNAPSHOT
A YOUNG WOMAN LIES ON A COUCH pushed up against a window framed by huge trees. Shadowed sunbeams give the illusion of time paused, perhaps waiting for a better moment. The woman’s skin looks pale, ghost-like, in her shorts and crumpled t-shirt, the leaf-print blanket pushed to the side. Her almost-black eyes are half open, she is smiling, not a big smile, like she doesn’t quite feel it but wants to be polite.
“Wake up sleepy head,” a voice said. In my dream I was speaking Mandarin to my ex-boyfriend, who kept wavering in and out. He had hoped I’d learn to speak the language of his people. His people. Who were my people? Why was he telling me to wake up? My legs were caught, wedged somehow, stuck. Something was pushing the air around my face. Tingles shot down my legs to my feet. Danger. I creaked open my eyes like a pine cone to the sun. My body was covered in sweat, my legs twisted in the bedclothes. Beth, barely peeking over five feet, was leaning over me waving a newspaper. The voice had been hers. The newspaper crackled and snapped like it was trying to tell me something.
“You need an apartment and then things will be much better,” Beth said like she had just read my fortune. “There’s an ad for a basement apartment in the Jewish newspaper.” I closed my eyes again and groaned. After my sister and some friends had helped me ‘disappear’ from my life with Sanjay, Beth had offered me sanctuary in her tiny shared apartment. I knew she wasn’t kicking me out but trying to move me along, get me back on my feet.
I had been stumbling through my days for a month now, not sleeping or eating much, and while astute at feigning wellness, was barely managing to function at work. When I attended Sunday church service there was a rustle-silence at my approach, like the wind’s passage through a forest. An aversion of eyes, their smiles like hiccups. I hadn’t just left a marriage, I had left a Reverend, without any attempt at reconciliation. “What would Jesus do?” I regularly mumbled to myself.
My nerves had become gnarled from my insatiable need to look over my shoulder for Sanjay. He knew where I worked and when at Beth’s, I was terrified he’d follow me home. I had recently moved into Mrs. Becker’s basement apartment in a neighbourhood full of fences and security cameras. She was a widow who needed someone to keep her company in the immense brick home her late husband had built in the Bathurst/St Clair region of Toronto. The basement was half decent aside from the earwigs with their flash-scuddle-dash and for the looming threat of extension cord plugged into extension cord plugged into extension cord. Mrs. Becker liked to bake challah, the aroma drifting downstairs like her ambient loneliness.
In order to access my apartment, I needed to enter Mrs. Becker’s back door and walk by her sitting room. Mrs. Becker asked me about my day and told me about hers, her grief a weight upon my grief.
SNAPSHOT
A WOMAN WEARING A PINK BALL CAP, her white-black hair askew, wears black shorts with a colour-splashed tank top and has her arms wrapped around an aspen tree. Its greenish-white trunk ridged with black scars, seems sturdy enough even with its Pisa-lean and dribbly sap. The woman’s eyes are closed and her smooth brown cheek presses against the bark as if listening for a heartbeat or a connection of sorts. Her purple shoed feet embrace the stony ground as if they’ve been planted.
Trees share nutrients and some have interconnected roots preventing individual trees from being knocked over by storms. No one suspected that Sanjay’s violence had branched into my inside parts, clogging rational thought, leaving room only for the fear that I had carried since childhood. The fear that sustained me. But when I needed help, my sister, friends and Mrs. Becker had sheltered me, creating a community where I felt safe.
I felt rooted. Connected. I was not alone.
Charmaine Arjoonlal (she/her) is a writer and social worker who lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. When she’s not squeezing in writing, she enjoys hanging out in coffee shops, biking, and swimming in cold lakes. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Reckon Review, MUTHA, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. You can visit Charmaine’s website at charmainearjoonlal.wordpress.com.
There is no logical reason to spend eighty dollars on a seven-inch vinyl, but standing in the living room on Christmas morning, cashed checks from relatives pending in my back account, their empty shells scattered across the record player, that’s exactly what I do. Two songs that I already own several times over digitally, loaded into my cart from an online retailer then, before I can think better of it, I click purchase.
On the recliner next to me, my partner holds our sleeping baby. Snow, rare along the coastline of Washington State where I now call home, has blanketed the entire area, coming up to the six-week old’s knees.
“This is stupid, huh?” I ask my partner, “I probably shouldn’t have done it.”
“It’s fine,” my partner says, rolling their eyes, “you’ve wanted it forever.”
A child of public-school teachers, who spent years in a family of four living on one Idaho teacher’s salary, I never buy things as soon as I want them. My father taught me that you cannot know you want something until it has been at least a day, that it will almost always be there the next day. I watched the digital marketplace for several years, noticing the slow creep upwards of the prices, the sellers shuffling in and out. Coveting it as if it was something more than the little grooves of two songs pressed onto a record, sitting in a reseller’s garage in Colorado, waiting for the day I finally cave.
*
There were four of us. Will, Rich, Lee, and I. We were friends in the way we knew how to be, the way men around us had passed on to us. We held a meanness in our mouths that would turn the flesh of our gums to cancer. We threw insults as if they were lighter than air, and everyone had their own exposed heel: Will was skinny, Lee was stupid, Rich was fat, and I was sensitive, girly, or more simply, queer. There was nearly nothing off limits, the belt so low that punches struggled to find purchase beneath it. You had to be one of us, drenched in our special brand of cruelty, to even think we were friends.
We didn’t make much sense from the outside either. Our tastes in music, hobbies, and our beliefs wandered and shared only the tiniest sliver of a Venn diagram. We were logs lashed together in frayed rope, our untrimmed branches and roots twisting and scraping at each other, floating with trepidation down a river we didn’t know, towards an ending we’d never put thought towards, hitting every rock we could.
*
It is in the realm of miracles that the song exists. The Mountain Goats have a long history of not releasing some of their best songs, leaving them as demos, outtakes, or rough sketches in a notebook that will sit on a dusty bookshelf somewhere in North Carolina until it is played once in a city you’ve never heard of.
They sometimes exist as evictees from an album. “We Shall All Be Healed” and “Attention All Pickpockets” from We Shall All Be Healed. “The Day the Aliens Came” and “High Doses #2” from The Sunset Tree. “Ethiopians” from Tallahassee and “Heel Turn 1” from Beat the Champ. Or they exist as orphans from any sort of thematic container. “Sign of the Crow #2,” “Hail St. Sebastian,” “Down to the Ark,” “The Plague,” and “You Were Cool.” Fans gather these songs onto playlists and Google Drives, follow the YouTube pages with the dozens of songs we have yet to hear, and scrape out corners of the internet to debate them.
“Steal Smoked Fish” is somewhat different in that it, along with the B-Side, “In the Shadow of the Western Hills,” was released as a promotional single. The first thousand pre-orders of Transcendental Youth got the 7” thrown in for free. An alternate take, trading out guitar for piano, was released in Japan as a bonus track.
The song was recorded on little more than a whim. John Darnielle, the songwriter and only stable member of the group in its over thirty-year existence, stated in an interview with Joseph Fink that he didn’t know whether he wanted to put it out at all. There was just a studio in Portland that had been booked with Brandon Eggleston, a longtime collaborator, and he needed songs to play.
Both songs on the single were recorded live to tape, then the tape was transferred directly to the stamper, in an attempt to get as close to the live performance as possible. There were no overdubs or fixes. In my mind, even the strings are a little old, that special coating they sometimes give them worn from gold to a browned silver. Even the guitar is a little scratched, the headstock a little scuffed from a smack after a miscalculation in a doorway. That is to say, when I put the 7” on in my living room, I imagine myself to be somewhere in a cramped studio in Portland, listening to the song, holding my breath to not make a noise.
*
I got to know Will from a health class where he made me laugh harder than I had in weeks. He was tall and lanky, with dark hair and a pale face, as if he had been genetically bred to be in a third-wave emo band.
We played guitar together in a band that could never get it together enough to write any of our own songs. I had played longer, but he worked harder, and soon mastered solos and alternative and drop tunings while I struggled to keep up. He was athletic too, with dreams of a college baseball career outside of the tiny North Idaho town we lived in being whispered out in the earliest hours, when the heavy weight of reality gets lighter and we are so close to sleep that we let our dreams escape a little easier.
He was the best looking of us, with the kind of aloofness that is easy to adore from the outside, but makes any sort of reciprocity in a friendship hard to come by. He kept things close and would half-jokingly threaten to kick someone’s ass if they asked too personal of a question, if they touched too close to whatever he wished to hide. By the end of our years of friendship, I felt I barely knew more about him than I had to begin with.
*
“Steal Smoked Fish” is a Portland song. More specifically, it is a song from the time in 1985/86 when Darnielle lived in the city. Anyone familiar with Portland can find a footing in the lyrics of the first verse: rain, bridges, region-specific convenience stores. Anyone familiar with Darnielle’s work knows what is coming towards them.
It is a hard thing to go back to a place in which you had a traumatic experience, and as a touring musician, Darnielle did it often. He talks candidly about visiting the places of his past: finding an opening to the apartment building he used to live in, a scuff mark he left on the door still there fifteen years later. He talks openly about the experiences too: overdosing, being up for days, and the disappointment of discovering the tinned fish you slipped up a baggy sleeve doesn’t taste as good as it looked on the package.
For a band that has written entire albums about professional wrestlers, Dungeon and Dragons, and Pagan persecution in late antiquity, the autobiographical mode is less common than one might expect. “Steal Smoked Fish” is unique too in that it both nods to a time in the band’s history before heavier instrumentation, while eschewing some of the proto-folk punk roots of the time as well: the fast paced strumming, vocals near yelling, with the hum of the cassette recorder sleeping beneath it. The song, then, is a vulnerable one, a tender nod to a past you weren’t sure you would ever make it out of.
*
Rich was that impressive combination of clever and smart. The kind of person who had the wit to get back at someone who had given him shit, while also knowing he was going to skip the grade they were in anyway.
He was also one of the few Latino kids in our overwhelming-majority white town, and that, along with his weight, caught him enough hard times that eventually he decided to take the offensive and go after you before you could go after him. Since we were friends, and I stayed on his good side, I saw the spaces where he was less prickly. I knew he wanted to be a Doctor. I knew he was from a town in Southern Idaho not too far from where I was born. I knew he loved his brother almost as much as he was annoyed by him.
Rich was the one who always seemed to catch me at my most vulnerable: crying, writing bad poems. Most of the time, he wouldn’t bring it up in front of the other guys, so there was a kind of mercy between us, perhaps even a kind of half-knowing from him of what I was and who I was eventually going to become.
*
I don’t really know a song until I’m playing it. There is something about the notes from my hands, the words from my own lips, that lets me stretch out my legs in a song, especially one that first hooks me from another’s performance of it. It is somewhere between performance and close reading, putting me with one foot back in the dingy clubs I used to play in and another in the windowless rooms I took literature classes in.
“Steal Smoked Fish” is only hard on the right hand, the frantic strumming of early Mountain Goats songs returned, but now balanced under the partial muting of the top strings under the flesh of the inside palm. It’s a certain balance of the hand over the strings, not insurmountable, but a stretch the first time I played it.
I don’t know when it joined the rotation of songs I would play when I’d notice my guitar perched on a stand in the corner of the room and go to it, and I don’t know when it jumped from the kind of song I’d have to start over when I forgot lyrics, test runs at a kind of mastery, to the kind of song I could play barely having to think about what my hands or lips were doing, letting my mind roam towards whatever it might reach for.
But I do know that I found the song shortly after I left North Idaho. Around the time when going back started to mean a six-hour drive. When I started to notice my hands involuntarily trembling as I crossed the bridge over the Spokane River and saw the state border up ahead. When I started to avoid places and people that would remind me of the past, of the lesser days that having survived, I didn’t wish to go back to. When I started to notice the cars my friends used to have passing by on highways and check every time to see who the driver was.
*
If there was ever a person I could’ve leaned on when needed, it was Lee. He was the only one of us who had been born in North Idaho, which gave him a weird kind of status to those who thought often about who “real” Idahoans were, which ones of us truly belonged, which, in a place full of people from California who hated other people from California, were fairly common.
His house was three miles off the highway, on the complete opposite side of the county from where I was, and over ten miles from the closest town, which had a population of less than a thousand. Horses I rarely saw ridden strolled in pastures punctuated by dirt bike jumps and you always had to watch to make sure the dogs didn’t run out in front of your car.
Lee held a kindness towards his friends that I didn’t see between most other boys. Like the rest of us, he knew how to find the tender parts of someone and shove their nose in it. But he was also the first one who, after a long-time girlfriend broke up with me because I could not be whatever she thought a boy or man should be, asked how I was, if I needed anything. Even after others did the same, his was the only that felt honest.
If there was anyone I would’ve told about what I was doing, how I was feeling, who I was finding myself to be, it would’ve been Lee. I like to imagine that he would’ve helped, in whatever incomplete or incorrect ways he could, and that he would’ve done his best, and that I would’ve loved him for it.
*
Death comes in the second verse and having once made itself clear, can never really step back into the shadows. It is here too that the “we” of the first verse fractures into the “you” and “I,” when the narrator takes a step back from a past remembered to look up at the history about to befell them. The narrator holds onto them for the time they have left, but with the luxury of having survived, knowing their ends.
It would be a year after Darnielle left Portland that the first drug for AIDS treatment was approved by the FDA, azidothymidine (AZT), but it would take nearly another decade for the more effective two and three-drug cocktails to come on the market. But then as now, medicines rarely make it to everyone who needs them, and none of the friends hiding under bridges from Portland rain made it out alive. Lives cut down in months. I don’t know what it is like to lose friends like this.
*
The first time I remember wanting to die I was ten-years old. Showing a D I got on an art assignment to my parents seeming worse than an end to my own existence, but it took a few years for that choice to feel like anything other than an immature impulse, for it to start to grow a beating heart of its own. Shame grew from poor grades to a deeper one about who I was finding myself to be, and how incongruent that self was to the world I knew, and as it did, suicide felt more real and honest. By the time I was thirteen, I would’ve been circling the “Nearly Every Day” choice on depression and suicidal ideation screeners.
It took five years for me to tell anyone. When I met my first psychiatrist, she seemed shocked I hadn’t used drugs or alcohol or self-harmed at all in those years, and the farther I get from it, the more shocked I am about it too.
*
Things fell apart for us in Portland too. We went on little more than a whim. Rich had a girlfriend to meet, and Lee and I had nothing better to do, so we piled in Rich’s white Jeep and drove the eight hours to a city none of us had really been to before.
By the time I went to Portland, it was a completely different city than the one Darnielle had lived in. There were no TV shows about Darnielle’s Portland, there were no efforts to keep it weird. Whatever one sees in a city that makes them drive their bulldozers over old buildings and erect more expensive ones in their place, hadn’t been seen yet. To Darnielle, I imagine it to be a city to escape to when you are from Southern California, and San Francisco feels too close to whatever you’re wanting to leave.
To me, Portland was the first time I saw queer men in real life, the first time I saw a rainbow flag in a store and everybody acting like it was the most normal thing in the world. While now I sometimes scoff at what can feel like a commodification of a community, businesses draping their towns in rainbow flags every June, it is hard to overstate what it meant to see myself as something other than something to be made afraid or disgusted by.
On the drive home, I planned my exit. Being around straight men in the closet can feel like you’re a spy behind enemy lines. I got to know, intimately, how the people I had surrounded myself with, the people who in no small way were part of what kept me alive, felt about people like me. I could count on one hand even the neutral things that were said to me about queer men, and none of them came from the people I was sharing a car with on the ride home. No matter how hard I tried to push it off, their words, once made clear, would not step back into the shadows.
*
I don’t know if there is a good way to move on from a time like Darnielle’s in Portland, but the third verse takes explosives and destroys all the evidence of his time there. This might be gentrification, the losing of the weird of Portland to the whims of people who wished to sanitize and capitalize on it. It also might be a nod to the kind of thing common, but not unique, to queer people: severing what keeps us grounded when the ground we were given is falling apart beneath us.
*
The last time I saw them was at a wedding. Rob, the only mutual friend all of us still kept, rented out the local fairgrounds for all the family and friends from North Idaho and Western Montana a wedding could muster. I knew some, Aunts and Uncles and Cousins from pictures in Rob’s parents house, but there were a few dozen I’d never met.
It was a dry wedding, a demand from a religious family member, so I snuck out to drink huckleberry vodka from a flask in my car. Will and Lee kept beers in open in the cupholders in the center console. We alternated when we went out to drink, to try to keep a low profile, and by a few hours in, we were all delightfully buzzed.
We talked about how they’d been, what they were up to, the light kinds of things from near-strangers that weddings seem to often elicit. Will was about to leave the Marines, his four years were nearly up. Lee hung cabinets in the houses being built on the disappearing prairies between our hometowns. I had lived in Western Washington for a year and was about to get married on a lavender farm out there. There were no attempts to exhume what had been laid to rest, no attempts to blow out hot breath on cool embers, and by nightfall we all went our separate ways.
*
It was mid-January when “Steal Smoked Fish” arrived, sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard that had been hand-cut to size. The snow from Christmas had given way to the wet and frozen earth and the nine-week-old slept under a blanket of white noise.
As the needle hit the groove, I thought about my old friends, what I’d heard from Rob in the years since the wedding. Will had left the Marines and went to college, there was a wedding coming up next summer. Rich was fixing mountain bikes in Boise and had a serious girlfriend. Lee had begun to parrot talking points from the Ben Shapiro Show so much that even Will, his friend since fifth grade, had stopped talking to him. I was glad to have Rob keeping these connections, however loose and weak, alive.
At the end of each verse, and throughout the bridge, Darnielle wishes for God to bless his friends from Portland. Being a devout Christian, with an entire album of songs named after scripture quotes, it is not a surprise to hear this in a Mountain Goats song. But what is a surprise is the feeling in myself, an agnostic for a decade, of wanting those same blessings from a God I do not believe in to people I hadn’t seen in three-and-a-half years.
By the end of the song, I’m picturing each of them. What they must look like now. What lives they must have found. I make stories to fill in the gaps and imagine the best scenarios possible for each of them. Will graduating and being happily married. Lee moving to Alaska like he said he wanted to. Rich loved and whole in Boise. I focus my eyes on the flame of the candle I lit next to me, and as the needle crawls across dead wax, imaging blessings like carrier pigeons shooting out overhead, hoping they reach the people who kept me alive, even when I didn’t think I wanted to be.
Keegan (he/him) is a writer currently living in Washington State with his family. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review, Salon, the Offing, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fourteen Hills, Phoebe Journal, and Tahoma Literary Review, among others. His chapbook, My Own Private Idaho, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. His book, Fairyboy: Notes on Growing Up Queer in Rural North Idaho, was selected as the runner-up for the 2024 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.
Does something real lie in the words to these new songs of yours? To maiden heads such fancy phrases sound laughably soft-core* “Lamplight o’er a broken heart…” now, who’d you write that for? Behind my desk I peer around at recent works of mine Then dim the lights and reckon out the joys of bygone times All trivial passions of the heart where not one line aligns
* In Chinese, this line reads like a pun about puns. The term 綺語 means either “ornate writing, fancy phrasing” or more euphemistically “smutty language, erotica.” The term 胡盧 means “loud laughter” or “calabash, bottle gourd” (in this latter sense also written 葫蘆.) Calabash may be used to allude to the closed world of women, to various hidden forbidden delights, or to the vagina and the delights sequestered therein. It could be read to mean “ornate writing like this is just hilarious” or else connotatively as something like “this kind of innuendo belongs between the sheets.” To top it off 綺語 is also a homophone for 岐語 “double entendre”
(Lyrics to the tune of “A Cut of Plum”) by Li Qingzhao
Now fragrance of red lotus fades, the mat feels autumn-blown. I loosen my gauze robe for bed, the boat I float in on my own*. Who’s sent a lover’s brocade letter this way across the clouds? Skywriting geese** return as moonlight fills the chill tower of one alone***
Flowers fall and scatter on their own as waters run and drain. A singular longing links us in two places with one pointless pain. This feeling clings and I can’t find it in me to put it out. It only falls out of the face to surface in the heart again.
*- The original literally says “I board my magnolia boat alone”. A boat of magnolia wood was a traditional image for any fine vessel, especially a poet’s, and was by extension used to refer to a bed. **- The migratory wild goose is a traditional symbol of mutual yearning, a legendary bearer of lovers’ messages. The original says literally “character geese”. The shape of a flock of geese was often likened to a character 一 “one” or, if in a v-shape, 人 “person”. ***- A woman waiting for her absent beloved atop a watchtower, scanning the countryside for any sign of his return was a stock image. The original says “moonlight fills the Western Tower”. The “Western Tower” in this genre is by convention a woman’s dwelling or chamber.
一剪梅
紅藕香殘玉簟秋。 輕解羅裳， 獨上蘭舟。 雲中誰寄錦書來？ 雁字回時， 月滿西樓。
花自飄零水自流。 一種相思， 兩處閒愁。 此情無計可消除， 才下眉頭， 卻上心頭。
Song of the Caged Goshawk
by Liu Zongyuan
High as the chill winds hiss and shrill, in flight with the hard frost, The skyward-striking scouring Goshawk swerves in dawn-lit day, Mighty mist-splinterer, cloud-cleaver, rainbow-render, darting Down thunder-sudden to skim hillocks like a ricochet.
In a hard swoosh his strapping quills cut through the thorn and bramble, He falls to snatch a fox or hare then soars again in gray. With fur-caked claws and blood-drunk beak, the frightener of fowl, He stands alone to scan the world and lords above his prey.
But summer-molten months and blistering winds come of a sudden. His molted feathers fall. Heart hewn, he broods and lies at bay. Grass-rover rats and racoon-dogs become his persecution. Ten times a night he stares about in shellshock and dismay,
Left with one wish: for pinion-swelling Fall to blast him free To scale the clouds uncaged again, and wind his natural way.
Risen high, the moon of fall Glows north on a Liaoyang barricade. The border is far. The moon gleams farther. Ice-bows flash as winds invade. Soldiers gaze back: home beats at the heart And war-steeds balk at the beat of a drum. The north wind grieves in the frontier grass And barbarous sands hide hordes to come. Frost freezes the sword blade into its sheath. Wind wears the banners to bits on the plain. Oh someday, someday, to bow near the palace And never hear camp-gongs clang again.
Waiting On Him (To the tune of “Bowing to the Moon”)
Anonymous
Off to another land my wayward man has gone But now New Year has well-nigh come And he has not made it home I hate his love that runs like water So reckless and so ready to roam He couldn’t care less for home Beneath the flowers I turn and pray To the powers of heaven and earth and say To this very day He has left me in this empty room alone I see above me the blues of heaven’s dome I am sure the moon and stars and sun Must know the pain I’ve seen I lean beside the window screen And let the tears come streaming down On my gold-beaded silken gown And cry away at unlucky fate And how messed up my karma has become Still I pray I see his face And I swear I’ll give him hell when he gets home
The poems translated here are rendered with consideration to form and rhyme, in response to what is now the dominant mode of translating classical Chinese verse into English. The audio recording contains the first three poems here, read in Chinese and then in English. The latter two are read in an approximate reconstruction of how (certain) Chinese speakers (might have) pronounced the text at a time of early reception. Thus, while I read Wang Guowei’s poem with modern Mandarin pronunciation, I read Li Qingzhao’s and Liu Zongyuan’s poems in hypothetical reconstructions of certain late 12th and early 9th century dialects, respectively.
Wang Guowei’s poem was written in the early 20th century. To my mind, the poet realizes, as he writes in the classical style, that what he’s saying doesn’t match what he’s thinking. Traditional poetry once had a vital social function, served as a means of refined expression, and was normatively presumed to be non-fictional. Now it corresponds to no reality whatsoever. It’s become a heap of clichés that don’t align with the world he knows, an arabesque of refined word games.
Liu’s poem (commonly read as allegory for his exile in a tradition where autobiographical reference is often simply assumed) is distinctive for use of sound. If I had to pick a single Tang poem where knowledge of medieval Chinese pronunciation could enrich one’s reading, it would be this one. Here, Liu packs in checked-tone syllables ending in the stop consonants /k/, /t/ and /p/ (which do not survive in Mandarin but do in some other forms of Chinese, such as Cantonese). They make up 27% of the syllables in this text, a far greater proportion than would be expected to occur by chance. Every line has at least one, and they are concentrated overwhelmingly in the first sections of lines. In my reading, it emphasizes the bird’s speed and ferocity in hunting, and the cramped and thrashing discomfort of confinement. I have taken the liberty of packing the English translation with some rather audible sound play.
“Bowing to the Moon,” is a popular song from the mid-Tang dynasty from a collection recovered in a scroll-cave at Dunhuang. Unlike much verse in this genre in the early period, this lyric may have actually been composed by a woman, rather than by a man in a woman’s voice.
Wang Guowei (1877-1927) was a Chinese poet and historian. Born in Haining, he worked in Shanghai as a newspaper proofreader after failing the imperial examination. He studied Japanese and eventually studied natural sciences in Tokyo for a year, followed by a study of German idealism. He left for Japan again during the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, and returned to China 5 years later remaining a loyalist of the overthrown Qing emperor. He was appointed professor at Tsinghua university in 1924 and committed suicide by drowning in 1927 in Kunming Lake before the NRA entered Beijing.
Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) is traditionally held to be China’s greatest woman poet. She led a colorful life as a scholar of history, a literary critic, an art collector specializing in bronze inscriptions, a painter, calligrapher, and poet. She is considered the finest writer of cí poetry, lyric verse set to tunes of the Song Dynasty.
Liu Zongyuan (773 – 819), born in present-day Shanxi, was a philosopher, poet, and politician of the Tang dynasty. Along with Han Yu, he was a founder of the 古文運動 “Classical Prose Movement.” In 805 after falling out of favor with the government, he found himself exiled first to Yongzhou and then to Liuzhou. During his exile he composed a considerable volume of verse and prose.
Bao Junhui (fl. 790s) was a poet of late eighth century China who achieved fame during the reign of Emperor Dezong during the Tang. Little is known of her. Widowed young with no brothers, she was invited by Dezong to the palace alongside other talented women of letters.
A. Z. Foreman is a translator, poet, and language-acquisition addict working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Occitan, Ukrainian, Russian, Irish, and Yiddish have appeared in publications like Metamorphoses, Brazen Head, Asymptote, and the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He’s voiced John Wycliff in a documentary by Catherine Warr and Wang Wei in a video-essay by Jacob Geller in historical accents. He also writes his own poetry when he must. Importantly, if you have a dog he’d love to pet it. Find him on YouTube here.
The court doctor ruled, it is uncomfortable to carry your miniature soldier, so the man we saw in the train should be prosecuted. You are welcome to spend the night in my nest, says the rat. The green wind does not recognize the three corpses it brushes. The night does not know the green dress it ruffles. Who has left that military pistol in the tree, decorated by foliage? These, too, are clues: fur, more weapons rest in the yellow coffin, three more lie in the hunger. Who belongs to the grey, gloved hand the prosecutor found on the seat? The eager men want to dress the moon in asphalt. It doesn’t matter if the baby is upside down. They babble incessantly at it. Their white fingers wake the piano and lie to its teeth. The man we are after has spent twenty years on the train. How many millions of times the compartment door has opened and closed since he began, and he still does not recognize anyone. Each time he reaches the border, police ask, why do you sit at the snakeline to your homeland? The man does not answer, just turns from translucent to green. He’s just had a vision of his neighbor in his coffin.
Im Zug
Der Gerichtsarzt entschied, dass es unangenehm ist, Ihren Miniatursoldaten zu tragen, daher sollte der Mann, den wir im Zug gesehen haben, strafrechtlich verfolgt werden. Du kannst gerne in meinem Nest übernachten, sagt die Ratte. Der grüne Wind erkennt die drei Leichen, die er bürstet, nicht. Die Nacht kennt das grüne Kleid nicht, das sie zerzaust. Wer hat diese mit Laub geschmückte Militärpistole im Baum gelassen? Auch dies sind Hinweise: Weitere Waffen ruhen im gelben Sarg, drei weitere liegen im Hunger. Wer gehört zu der grauen, behandschuhten Hand, die der Staatsanwalt auf dem Sitz gefunden hat? Die eifrigen Männer wollen den Mond mit Asphalt bekleiden. Es spielt keine Rolle, ob das Baby auf dem Kopf steht. Sie plappern ununterbrochen mit ihm. Ihre weißen Finger wecken das Klavier und liegen an den Zähnen. Der Mann, nach dem wir suchen, hat zwanzig Jahre im Zug verbracht. Wie oft hat sich die Abteiltür seit Beginn geöffnet und geschlossen, und er erkennt immer noch niemanden. Jedes Mal, wenn er die Grenze erreicht, fragt die Polizei, warum Sie an der Schlangenlinie in Ihre Heimat sitzen. Der Mann antwortet nicht, sondern wechselt nur von durchscheinend zu grün. Er hatte gerade eine Vision von seinem Nachbarn in seinem Sarg.
The Danger of Flowers
He serves the pigeon, expanding his great grey beard to please her. His star signs deliver the convoluted news: your dead father sits at the street corner in this moment, open to questions if you can find his face. Numbers make dazed revolutions around his head. He wants to talk about the construction of his obscured mouth and replay the funeral march with more portable materials than glass coffin, green cells, but the danger of flowers heightens the summer. Crooked steps fall into a meadow where daily Mass is sung for the exiled seagulls to white violins, red voices. And then comes the law, intimidated by the inflamed flowers, and declares red faces, like the deads’ silken tongues, to be illegal. Normally someone else makes the sacrifice: the lamb, the sepal throat. Today the wind sleeps white.
Die Gefahr von Blumen
Er dient der Taube und erweitert seinen großen grauen Bart, um ihr zu gefallen. Seine Sternzeichen liefern die verschlungene Nachricht: Dein toter Vater sitzt in diesem Moment an der Straßenecke und ist offen für Fragen, ob Du sein Gesicht finden kannst. Zahlen machen benommene Umdrehungen um seinen Kopf. Er möchte über die Konstruktion seines verdeckten Mundes sprechen und den Trauermarsch mit tragbareren Materialien als Glassarg und grünen Zellen wiederholen, aber die Gefahr von Blumen erhöht den Sommer. Krumme Stufen fallen auf eine Wiese, auf der täglich die Messe für die vertriebenen Möwen zu weißen Geigen und roten Stimmen gesungen wird. Und dann kommt das Gesetz, eingeschüchtert von den entzündeten Blumen, und erklärt rote Gesichter wie die seidenen Zungen der Toten für illegal. Normalerweise bringt jemand anderes das Opfer: das Lamm, der Kelchhals. Heute schläft der Wind weiß.
Annunciation
The old clock worries its hands over black numbers. The girl is missing. The moon is bright as linen. Its strands illuminate an unprotected heart. Guilty or not guilty, absolution lies in the blue cloak of the nun sitting hours-long under the linden, drinking the purple juice like the poppy, her rosary wrapped around stars at their birth. Thus half-strangled, the stars bless us with their burnt red breath. In the green pond, dark fish dip into darker night. From the rocks, this night’s annunciation rings false. Ribbons fall from the girl’s head. Her captor whistles behind a rock. The girl weeps over green holy sayings in silence, her mouth bright red, her eyes still unbroken. She clings to a magnolia blossom. Her captor winds a string of bread around her neck. The birds will arrive by morning.
Verkündigung
Die alte Uhr macht sich Sorgen um schwarze Zahlen. Das Mädchen wird vermisst. Der Mond ist hell wie Leinen. Seine Stränge beleuchten ein ungeschütztes Herz. Schuldig oder nicht schuldig, die Absolution liegt im blauen Umhang der Nonne, die stundenlang unter der Linde sitzt und den lila Saft wie Mohn trinkt. Ihr Rosenkranz ist bei der Geburt der Sterne gewickelt. So halb erdrosselt segnen uns die Sterne mit ihrem verbrannten roten Atem. Im grünen Teich tauchen dunkle Fische in eine dunklere Nacht ein. Von den Felsen aus klingt die Verkündigung dieser Nacht falsch. Bänder fallen vom Kopf des Mädchens. Ihr Entführer pfeift hinter einem Felsen. Das Mädchen weint schweigend über grüne heilige Sprüche, den Mund hellrot und die Augen immer noch ungebrochen. Sie klammert sich an eine Magnolienblüte. Ihr Entführer wickelt sich eine Brotschnur um den Hals. Die Vögel werden am Morgen ankommen.
A Silken Net
No one had any time for martyrs. An arctic symphony, by ice. I thought my murderer would be more discerning. Like pain in a foreign language, prayer in a foreign landscape. Heaven just draws a cloud across the scene so He does not have to see His creation. A rape. Am I low on folic acid? The old remedy for thieves was vinegar. It is as though God whispered to Himself, what is the most fertile pain? Then tossed a bell to the arching waves. Retaliated upon my soul by prolonging it as a candle wick. I did not let Him touch me in turn. Together we build an arch of sound overhead, two chords around our necks. The song loves us.
The shadows of the terminally ill are drifting along the ward. One day it will be possible to transcribe their memories. The doctor needs the patients to feed his poems. If a dream is a wish the heart makes, do we desire silver men with green daggers at our backs? Throw on the unexpected garment, a timely emaciation. The echoes from His passion drip off pillars, turned to holy yellow sweat. The light greens and the devil grins. Store your kisses for winter. Malodorous short slips of the aged.
I dream of a word I can carry in my palm like a spider: ornate with hair and honest in intention. Someone changed my sleep. I am now sleeping without meaning, without words left in the morning. Between the rain and the forgotten, I stand emptied. Fallen from our hands, finally, is grace. The long dead smell of dampened fire lingers. We stand up to our knees soaking wet, stars in our net, lice more alive on our scalps.
Ein Seidennetz
Niemand hatte Zeit für Märtyrer. Eine arktische Symphonie aus Eis. Ich dachte, mein Mörder wäre anspruchsvoller. Wie Schmerz in einer Fremdsprache, Gebet in einer fremden Landschaft. Der Himmel zieht nur eine Wolke über die Szene, damit er seine Schöpfung nicht sehen muss. Eine Vergewaltigung. Habe ich wenig Folsäure? Das alte Mittel gegen Diebe war Essig. Es ist, als hätte Gott sich selbst geflüstert, was ist der fruchtbarste Schmerz? Dann warf er eine Glocke zu den gewölbten Wellen. Vergeltete sich an meiner Seele, indem sie sie als Kerzendocht verlängerte. Ich ließ mich nicht seinerseits berühren. Zusammen bauen wir einen Klangbogen über uns, zwei Akkorde um den Hals. Das Lied liebt uns.
Die Schatten der todkranken Menschen treiben über die Station. Eines Tages wird es möglich sein, ihre Erinnerungen zu transkribieren. Der Arzt braucht die Patienten, um seine Gedichte zu füttern. Wenn ein Traum ein Wunsch des Herzens ist, wünschen wir uns dann silberne Männer mit grünen Dolchen im Rücken? Ziehen Sie das unerwartete Kleidungsstück an, eine rechtzeitige Abmagerung. Die Echos seiner Leidenschaft tropfen von den Säulen und verwandelten sich in heiligen gelben Schweiß. Das helle Grün und der Teufel grinsen. Bewahren Sie Ihre Küsse für den Winter auf. Geruchliche kurze Ausrutscher der Alten.
Ich träume von einem Wort, das ich wie eine Spinne in meiner Handfläche tragen kann: mit Haaren verziert und ehrlich in der Absicht. Jemand hat meinen Schlaf verändert. Ich schlafe jetzt ohne Bedeutung, ohne Worte am Morgen. Zwischen dem Regen und dem Vergessenen stehe ich leer. Aus unseren Händen gefallen ist schließlich die Gnade. Der lange tote Geruch von gedämpftem Feuer hält an. Wir stehen klitschnass auf den Knien, Sterne in unserem Netz, Läuse auf unserer Kopfhaut lebendiger.
Translator’s Note:
This selection of poetry comes from Ein Seidennetz, which Georg and I have agreed to call A Silken Net of Stars and Lice in the collection’s English-language incarnation. The poems are informed by (neuro)divergent experiences and the strangeness of language as invocation. We both like the idea of words that originally create, that we might for a moment—through all these shards of language we swish broken over bloodied tongues—incant the thing named! We incant in the ways we can that nevertheless resemble joiks for the wind, hymns for the desert from the mystic walled in as anchoress—for we write about our homes, such bodies as stars and lice, from the outside peering longingly back in. At the same time, we write and translate from the four doorless stone walls of the anchorage cell, reaching out toward the night and the stones that do not hold human shapes. We want to elucidate the beauty in stars and lice, “the danger of flowers,” the strange “silken tongues of the dead,” the exiled birds, without fear of the contradictions and paradoxes that inform our lives. Instead we seek to live in them: for example, Georg implies in the poems presented here that we can only lie with words, such as those that God used for the first time to create—yet far from comprehensible to human logic, our creation through words feels “[l]ike pain in a foreign language, prayer in a foreign landscape.” A word “more honest in intention” would be “a word I can carry in my palm like a spider: ornate with hair…” and feeling, a word more spider-like and less human-made. For logical human words, like God-words, transform the in-between moments in which meaning is creative into recognizable shapes that are meaningless, or at least mean less. Thus it is that Georg and I have an ardent and doomed goal: to invoke in color and movement, to re-animate in these collaborations ways of feeling across decades and feeding the lice with emotions that seep from our scalps across continents.
Georg Amsel comes from Salzburg and conceives poetic ideas in an Austrian German from the late 1800s. His poems appear recently in Lotus-eater Magazine, Cagibi, Portland Review, and Passages North, among others, and his work “Komfort” translated by Lake Angela as “Comfort” is listed in the Best Literary Translations 2025 anthology from Deep Vellum. His poetry seeks to disrupt the contemporary uses of language as much as its translations do. Self portrait by the author.
Lake Angela holds a PhD in the intersemiotic translation of poetry and dance from the University of Texas at Dallas and has her MFA in poetry. Her books include Organblooms and Words for the Dead (FutureCycle Press) and Scivias Choreomaniae (Spuyten Duyvil). Recent publications appear in The Common, Another Chicago Magazine, BODY, New York Quarterly, and River Heron Review, among others. Her work advocates for schizophrenia spectrum creativity, and she welcomes visitors to lakeangeladance.com. Image by Jésica Cichero.
the neon body fluid from the pines sticks to our paws it crackles when we shave their bark like we shave our scalps
surrounded by trunks rubbed bare by wild boars we wander in the rank scent of the fawns sharp signs of incorporation entice until we are drenched in our own sweat and dizziness
we emerge from the tangled woods pungent barefoot and sink into the agitated meadow as it feeds and teams where mammals rhythmically move their mouths and patiently gaze at us with intimate eyes
MID-JUNE LIGHT
I breathe in the twirling praise of songbirds so they have not yet died plump speech bubbles linger in the air ongoing inception evolutionary spurts decay
ants pull more than their own ancient dead weight towards my feet spiders weave filigree threads from their glands pinecones crack and burst open in the heat we have seen everything, understood nothing and released the seeds
ground wasps emerge from their burrows right next to my human face as it rests there in the sand to peek out and crawl back growth and food mandibles and this entire indeterminately ailing gaze
EXTRALINGUAL
I swing oldly in the hammock anchored to the trees in the forest as if in a baby’s cradle in which I never lie at night pine trees with their flaky bark speak to me truthfully as their sap flows their resinous body odor embalms everything through the black branches crescent moonlight flows across me year after year from the drifting-away moon
SMOLDER
must I then say farewell world from your sweet salty waters and green hills I have seen you from above like a space traveler you are so tender and full of grace
every slice of decomposing street pizza still hurts my soul we are being duped and discounted, my heart in dieback
our scars like to break open and bleed we extract the last of our strength like fossil water
the sleepers never manage to rest the light- and soundscapes swell the devices are always transmitting
we must bow down
Translator’s Note:
These four poems come from German poet Kerstin Becker’s latest poetry collection Das gesamte hungrige Dunkel ringsum (The Entire Hungry Darkness Enveloping, 2022), which received critical acclaim and was selected as a Poetry Recommendation of the year by the German Academy for Language and Literature. Becker’s poetry stretches the German language as if it were a viscous membrane layered across the world, combined with an immediacy that recalls the sticky sweat of countryside summers, the disquieting un-darkness of summer nights, or the peaceful (Hegelian) recognition between species.
Her frequent rejection of orthographic and syntactic convention makes her poems thrilling to read and challenging but rewarding to translate. My approach to trans-creating them in English involves two stages. The first is to dissect the poems and parse them out. Some poems will not include any punctuation or capitalization—grammatical features that in German go a long way in clarifying the structure of a poem—thus rendering the poem simultaneously more open and more closed. The second stage—once I’ve deconstructed the poem and done my best to understand how all the pieces (words) fit together—is to focus primarily on the image and/or sense that I interpret an individual word, line, or poem to be offering in German, and then rendering that in English. Yet, occasionally, I render a turn of phrase more obliquely rather than “fluidly” so as to maintain a sense of the German.
Becker was born in the former East Germany, where she still lives. Among other jobs, she has worked as a cemetery caretaker and gardener, occupations which lie closely to the mood and world of her poems. There is an almost grimy freshness to her words, one that conjures vivid activity in the imagination. In a way I find hard to describe, Becker’s poetry sends me back to a childhood that typical representations of childhood don’t. Perhaps it’s because her poetry digs into the dirt of the earth and of life, and that reminds me of the farm I grew up on. Perhaps it’s because they reject cozy nostalgia, which I do too. Perhaps it’s because some of her poems remind me of how it felt to spend an entire August dog day exploring the woods after doing chores, and of the layers of dried sweat, mud and dirt only partially washed off by a swim in the creek. Perhaps it’s because Becker’s poems, insofar as they can be taken as emerging from her life, remind me of a previous stage of mine, one that I now look back on with fonder eyes than I used to. But her poems don’t rely on recycled pastoral romanticism. No, they get up close, to the damp earth, to the swarm of wildlife and wild life. To the teeming warmth of it all.
Kerstin Becker (b. 1969 in Frankenberg, East Germany) lives and writes in Dresden, having also worked as a typesetter, a bartender, a cemetery gardener, a teacher, and a translator. She is an editorial member of the journal Ostragehege and the author of three collections of poetry: Fasernackte Verse (Fiber-Bare Verses, 2012), Biestmilch (Beast Milk, 2016) and Das gesamte hungrige Dunkel ringsum (The Entire Hungry Darkness Enveloping, 2022). Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Czech, Hungarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. Becker has been awarded many prizes and grants for her writing.
Bradley Harmon (b. 1994 in Minnesota, USA) is a writer, translator, and scholar of German and Nordic literature. Currently a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, he has been an American-Scandinavian Foundation fellow to Sweden, a Fulbright fellow to Germany, and an Emerging Translator mentee with the American Literary Translator’s Association. Forthcoming book translations include poetry by Johannes Anyuru and Katarina Frostenson and prose by Monika Fagerholm and Birgitta Trotzig. He currently lives in Berlin.
in sixth grade there was an epidemic of HEPETITIS A so bad they scrubbed the trays those of the brigade
I was one of the few not infected
the SICK returned to school on restriction, but they ran and rode bikes through the empty streets screwing up their LIVERS
ms. dinorah announced IN THIS TOWN IN A FEW YEARS YOU’RE GOING TO SEE THE RESULTS OF THIS INFECTED BLOOD
I thought all my friends would die by fifteen
and they did die in some way
I may be one of them
WHAT WAS THE LAST NAME OF YOUR THIRD GRADE TEACHER?
at noon they were bringing lunch some old aluminum CANS left in the main hall; we pulled them in with a rebar bent into a CROWBAR
the nurses visited us for TWO REASONS to vaccinate or put in our mouths a harsh liquid infamous as THE LITTLE SIP
one afternoon the lunch truck apparently was going to explode they sent us away from school neither THE LITTLE SIP nor THE VACCINES could save us
crowded together against the wall we pioneers were crying but nothing exploded; instead we discovered that at THIS HOUR the sun was softening the asphalt spilled without gravel
we left CRATERS in our eagerness to get globules of oil THE STAINS stayed on our fingers for a week; we had survived
WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE PLACE YOUR WEDDING RECEPTION WAS HELD?
the lights of the college dorm room went out at one in the lower BUNK of aluminum pipes the blond and I banged carefully without shaking the one above who was, besides, a Jehovah’s Witness and had once seen objects MOVE as if by themselves
YOU CAN CALL ME NYMPHOMANIAC, YOU CAN CALL ME WHAT YOU LIKE she claimed those first months BUT YOU HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF ME what it meant in the language of the blond we had to screw every night
the bunk across the room could see our SHADOWS a year later on a merciless night we separated like objects that drift apart according to the scriptures
WHO WAS YOUR CHILDHOOD HERO?
during a BLACKOUT the family fell in a sinkhole earth swallowed them forms on the sidewalk saluted them as they passed we wondered later who it could have been a neighbor shouted in the distance I’M GOING TO SHOVE MY LEGS IN THE OVEN TO HAVE SOMETHING TO COOK WITH
FIRE BEETLE: phosphorescent points flying in parallel curves
AIRPLANE: red lights overhead blinking in a straight line
ON WHICH WRIST DO YOU WEAR YOUR WATCH?
they tried to steal it from me two NIGHTS
the first I woke from a dream pulling so strong on THAT ARM that when fleeing the sleepwalker dragged my bed with him
the second, also asleep another hand leaped through the little window of the bus his fingers dipping under THE WRISTBAND I towed him a few meters
I was not the one with the untouchable properties the watch was heir to something that granted the left hand an instinct for conservation stronger than its resistance to water
it has already stopped telling time at the bottom of THIS SUITCASE
WHAT WAS YOUR HAIR COLOR AS A CHILD?
at midnight they put A BULLET in the leg of the old woman who demanded to participate in the celebration of the Revolution
it was not a bullet shot from a pistol around the bonfire lit by rays of matches the missile lodged heads were set on fire we had to run I never knew where the ORDNANCE was coming from
I had escaped this bullet at seven on the slope of the backyard of a house; in the ritual they said when BURNING it left a silhouette of a turtle we hit our heads as in Russian roulette until one of us decided to start the RACE
we poured into the street, running away without knowing from what
and this, I remember, was weeks before the host would show us that by means of an EXTREME CRUNCH it was possible to blow yourself
Translator’s Note:
The poems from The Past is a Lonesome Town (El pasado es un pueblo solitario; Bokeh, 2015) are, on the one hand, a lyric sequence shaped by coming of age in a small-town Cuban childhood during the late stages of Fidel Castro’s regime, and on the other, a testament of exile, memory traces in the wake of forsaking a complicated homeland. The “prompts,” in English, are security questions—required of immigrants hoping to establish accounts and services—which the newly-arrived Morales only half-understood and, given Morales’ characteristic irony, questions which have trenchant implications for the poet’s new “American” identity. Morales, who graduated with an architecture degree in Cuba, moved in 2009 to the Dominican Republic for two years and then emigrated to study at New York University, where he received an MFA and a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature.
A special challenge in “carrying over” into English Morales’ often oblique, associative leaps is rendering the intelligently bewildered and flustered tone of the motivated immigrant faced with obstacles to his future and yet filled with indelible memories of the past—literally living “between,” just as a translator experiences the contrary pulls of two language traditions and, like the speakers in Morales’ poems, labors between those forces. Frost famously declared poetry is what’s lost in translation, but my experience is that poetry is also what is found there, a linguistic tightrope act that demands the same concentration and balance; practicing, we often fall off. One reason is that, in my view—by no means shared by all readers and writers—a translator is not just the transmitter of a poem into what is somewhat clumsily called the “target” language, but also the creator of an original text. Or to put it another way, as Tolstoy translator Richard Pevear says, “translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, but a dialogue between two languages.” Octavio Paz goes further at the start of his essay on translation: When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate. By extension, then, literature—the most creative use of language–is always a process of translation, turning the content of the imagination into literary art, even when poets and readers speak the same tongue. Many translators have noted that their struggles to re-create a writer’s words in those of a different language in fact continue the original struggle of the writer to render nonverbal realities into words. But not all translators are lucky enough to work with the author, and certainly none can have learned as much and worked as pleasurably as I have with Osdany Morales. More than a dozen other of my translations of his work from El Pasado es un Pueblo Solitario have already appeared in the journals Interim, The Bangalore Review, Asymptote, and forthcoming in the Denver Quarterly. As for other questions that arise from literary translation—a vast subject—I like to think I’m not being defensive when I quote Gregory Rabassa, asked by an interviewer if he knew enough Spanish to translate Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. “The real question,” Rabassa corrected the interviewer, “is whether I know enough English.”
Osdany Morales was born in Nueva Paz, Cuba, in 1981. He is the author of two collections of short stories, Minuciosas puertas estrechas (Narrow Little Doors; Ediciones UNIÓN, 2007), and Antes de los aviones (Before the Flights; Suburbano Ediciones, 2013); two novels, Papyrus (The Last Librarian; Dalkey Archive, 2012) and Zozobra (Landfall; Bokeh, 2018); a poetry collection, El pasado es un pueblo solitario (The Past is a Lonesome Town; Bokeh, 2015); and a book of essays on Cuban literature, Lengua Materna (Mother Tongue; Bokeh, 2023). Morales has received the 2006 David Award, a 2008 Casa de Teatro prize, and the 2012 Alejo Carpentier Award.
Harry Bauld’s poetry collections are The Uncorrected Eye and How to Paint a Dead Man. He was included by Matthew Dickman in Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press). His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and U.K. and won the New Millenium Writings award and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize. He divides his time between New York and the Spanish Basque Country.
Approaching the supermarket she heard a strange sound.
Something like the rippling and grating of a gigantic metal surface. A powerful southerly had been blowing since the night before. The parking lot was sweltering and deserted, strange even for mid-August. The intense heat and high-pressure air had seared the asphalt, and pockets of the surrounding vegetation had turned a burnt, black-brown color. It was Sunday afternoon and the color of the sky was changing to gray. The neighborhood was encircled by a wall of leaden-blue clouds from the west. Droves of shopping carts formed a large metallic snake at the fore of the parking lot, where a lone old man was sitting on the patio of the attached outdoor café. He looked like a wax figure of Pope Ratzinger with sunglasses. He was completely still. The wind made an eerie sound as it hit the metal blocks. Raising her head in search of its source, she saw the enormous first letter of the word KONZUM tottering precariously above her. She was startled out of her hypnotic gaze when two arms encircled her waist tightly from behind. Out of nowhere a large plush mask appeared right in front of her face. It looked like an elephant and a mutated insect put together. The mask was followed by two young women. They were giggling and taking pictures of her with their cell phones while the monstrosity rubbed up against her with its giant plush antennae. I’m a sqeeter, uttered a voice behind the mask. ZZZZZZZZ. I’m an old geezer. He refused to let her go. The two girls, in a fit of hysterical laughter, shoved two promotional samples of Autan insect repellant into her hands. The geezer-sqeeter kept pricking her torso with its thick stuffed snout, which hung from its head like an elongated nose. She felt totally disoriented in the midst of the ambush. The man lasciviously poked her with his snout, while the girls riled him on, ooo you reeeally stung her now, you really stuuung her, and doubled over with laughter. She hastily tore herself out of that sudden promotional assault, threw the samples of Autan on the ground, and rushed toward the store, its open doors welcoming her like a life raft. The monstrosities remained on the other side of the door. Through the glass, she watched their grimaces and convulsions like scenes from a silent horror film.
The supermarket was empty and cold as a grave. The usual advertising jingles—“Because you deserve it” and other tame melodies—were inaudible, as was the beeping of barcode scanners. At the entrance stood a cardboard cutout of a smiling Konzum mannequin with slightly larger-than-human dimensions. Below the cardboard man were the words: Konzum—with you through life, and next to him, a semi-faded sign that read: Konzum—the Croatian word for supermarket. The only other living thing in the entire store was a single cashier—a woman on the stockier side, with wavy blond hair, and barely taller than the cash register in front of her. She was holding a small bar of chocolate and preparing to take a bite.
She didn’t notice anyone else entering the store. She directed her gaze toward the ceiling, where the aisle markers were hanging on chains and lightly swaying. Meat, Dairy, Cleaning Supplies, Bakery, Beverages. She picked up a smaller red basket; she didn’t intend to buy much, just a few essentials to hold her over until the next day. Yogurt, milk, some pastries. She looked around, hoping to see other shoppers. The floor was dirty, covered with litter and footprints—like they hadn’t cleaned it for days. The shelves didn’t sport their usual abundance. Many products were on sale because of their imminent expiration date. There were no fresh fruits or vegetables, aside from blackened bananas and one soft and wrinkled cucumber. The Agrokor retail conglomerate was struggling to stay afloat, even though this was the only grocery store in the neighborhood. With all its former splendor, Konzum was going the way of the long-vanquished Diona, Slavija, and Union stores. Their shelves had gaped empty as though ahead of an impending cataclysm, before the stores closed for good. Here, too, only books remained plentiful on the rotating displays in front of the checkout lanes. They gleamed in their glossy plastic wrappers, some with a promotional gift—sunscreen lotion or a packet of instant coffee.
As she walked along the rows of empty shelves, she felt uneasy. She hoped at least one other person might be here, not counting the cashier and herself. Every now and then she’d glance between the aisles toward the cash registers. The cashier had hardly moved and was so motionless that she looked from a distance like a St. Nikola chocolate figurine in its red-and-green wrapper. In fact, the cashier seemed to be chomping down on just the one. An entire candy aisle was filled with those chocolates, left over from the holiday season—various Santa Clauses and Easter Bunnies trademarked by Milka and Lindt, reindeer, eggs, and chicks. She was heading in the direction of the bakery when she heard a sudden noise. A man in a red Konzum uniform with a cart full of beverages passed in front of her. He was starkly thin and bony, barely a pale shadow of the cardboard mannequin. He anxiously heaved the beverages like an ant with an oversized load and nearly knocked her down with the overburdened cart. At the last moment, she stepped back, in the direction of a fridge filled with cured meats. She paused in front of the fridge. It too had surprisingly little to offer. Just a few factory-sealed packages of prosciutto, mortadella, and ham. Overcast with shades of gray and brown, the squashed pieces of meat had not a hint of the appetizing bright pink color shown on their packaging. Most were plastered with yellow labels that said CLEARANCE in red letters. She stared at the meat as if they were clues to a mystery. She paused. She stroked the packages of squashed meat.
She was startled out of her thoughts by a trembling voice whispering to her: – I see you like munching meaty treats? – It was the old man she had seen in the café outside the store. How had she failed to see him enter the store and approach her? He had on an unbuttoned shirt and tinted glasses. She didn’t want to stare, but she thought his fly was open. She remained frozen in place. And then he asked her: – And do you like granddaddies?
Feeling as if she’d just been slapped in the face, she headed in the direction of the dairy aisle. The old man moved slowly and feebly. She shoved a fruit yogurt into the basket and took a carton of unrefrigerated Tetra-Pak milk from the stack. She only needed to grab some bread and then she’d get out of this rotten place. The silence in the store was abruptly interrupted by a turbo-folk song, which sounded like it was being played on someone’s phone. She soon heard humming, too. A young man she recognized from around the neighborhood had entered the store. He looked about eighteen and spent most of his time out on the street. He often turned people’s heads by belting some song on one of the benches in the park or shouting at passersby. She suddenly heard the music stop. The young man cursed his phone and the battery. She’d almost reached the bakery department. The young man, who wasn’t in her line of sight, periodically shouted something. Screw this or that thing, motherfucking noodles, coffee, frying pans, and on and on, with every item that was out of stock. He mentioned the head of Konzum last: fucking Todorić, screw that thieving fucker. From his voice, she could tell how far away he was. Then he began to hum what she presumed was another turbo-folk melody. At first so quietly that she couldn’t make out the words, then more and more loudly. His voice echoed throughout the store. Kon-zu-ming, Shit-ting, Ex-pi-ring, we’re livestock ready for a-slaughtering! She stood in the bakery department while the voice of the young man drew closer and closer to her. Kon-zu-ming, Shit-ting, Ex-pi-ring. In the bakery, there wasn’t a living soul. There were no fresh pastries, no bread. Only a few vacuum-sealed American toasted loaves with long shelf lives. Kon-zu-ming, Shit-ting, Ex-pi-ring. She waited at the counter, hoping someone would appear. The young man was getting closer and closer—he’d spotted her now and was heading straight towards her. Kon-zu-ming, Shit-ting, Ex-pi-ring. She stood motionless at the counter. The young man stopped humming and walked right up to her. She could feel his breath. He smelled like cigarettes and neglect. She turned and looked into his eyes. The whites were streaked with tiny red lightning bolts. His face looked strangely bloated. They stood there, side by side, in tense silence. All of a sudden, an eruption of noise—of glass bottles, at the other end of the store. She shuddered. She broke into a run in the direction of the checkout. The aisle markers above her began to sway. At the checkout, the cashier was gone. She heard only a voice that asked her if she had a Multiplus discount card. She looked around in wonder for the source of that faint female voice. It seemed to be coming from a pile of chocolate crumbs on a red-and-green wrapper lying on the counter.
Translator’s Note:
Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories (Poštovani kukci i druge jezive priče), published by Profil Knjiga in 2019, is a short story collection by acclaimed Croatian writer Maša Kolanović. The twelve stories dramatize the creeping spread of capitalism in contemporary Eastern Europe. Woven together through the metaphor of cockroaches and other “pests”, the stories expose the absurd and sinister facets of otherwise familiar situations—like going to IKEA, signing up for a phone plan, or vacationing on the beach. The stories move from the aggressively gentrified Adriatic coast (hyped as the setting for Game of Thrones) to Zagreb’s socialist-era high-rises (home to many of Kolanović’s characters) and its metropolitan outskirts (where refugees are detained from entering “Europe proper”).
Alongside “Unending” (story #7) (which appeared in Asymptote) and “Dolls from Chernobyl” (story #8) (which appeared in Two Lines Journal, in Vlad Beronja’s translation), the story published here—“Konzuming” (story #10)—offers a nightmarish sketch of the mega-chain grocery store Konzum, where a young woman confronts an onslaught of sexualized brand advertisements and factory-sealed packages of processed foods. Since late-capitalist forms of empire weaponize bad poetry, the story’s violence unfolds to the accompaniment of cutesy jingles and catchy slogans. This soundtrack not only poses a significant translational challenge—in late-capitalist terms, an exponential one!—but also reveals the story’s global reach in an era of privatization and hyper-concentrated wealth.
“Konzuming” explicitly names Ivica Todorić, the once-CEO of Agrokor, which he would later transform into the joint stock company Konzum. Serving as a leading player in 1990s privatization processes, Todorić came to monopolize the retail industry, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the region. As its acquisitions billowed beyond manageability and private pockets were more readily lined than store shelves, the company was forfeited to the Croatian government. While federal authorities charged Todorić with embezzlement, those charges were later dropped. Kolanović’s story bravely bears witness to this recent history.
Maša Kolanović is an award-winning author best known for her genre-bending works of fiction and poetry. Her books include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the Lonely, 2001), the novel Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), and the short story collection Poštovani kukci i druge jezive priče (Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories, 2019). The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb.
Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-American writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Dial, and World Literature Today, among others, and has received support from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis.
Before: There was a thrush on the windowsill when the man came in. After: The thrush built a nest in the desk. Before: The girl had not felt her body. After: Therefore, could not feel the atrophy. Before: Body parts hinged by tendon to bone. After: Body parts separated to float up and away. Hanging among the rafters of the old home. A side of leg. An esophagus. Her collarbone caught on ceiling. To lament the organ lost: song. Before: She had woken to the call of the thrush. After: She could not sleep and lay in bed waiting for the eh-oh-lay of the bird who saw it all.
Dilapitatia Disorder Class: Obsession
1. Recurrent and persistent thoughts about dilapidated homes
2. Finds it difficult or unable to control the need to be near dilapidated homes
3. The obsession is associated with three or more of the following six symptoms (with at least some symptoms present for more days than not for the past 6 months)
a. Fantasies of trespassing, insists that property and home are constructs
b. Xanthoria and Ramalina, jarred
c. Breaking glass windows to enter abandoned homes, only to undress in the roofless kitchen
d. A box kept in the trunk of car containing a pinhole camera, a crowbar, a collection of wooden doorknobs
e. Not able to accommodate responsibilities such as work and family, instead, takes long road trips with maps marked with yellow squares
f. Collects antique field guides
April 13th Some people collect porcelain figurines. Some, tin photographs of other people’s families. Or masks once used for rituals, now hung on
walls, showcasing the flex of ownership (over the dead! over the liminal!) interwoven into elements of design, from kitsch to bohemian. But to collect an entire home through a dark chamber, this has required a certain relationship to the art of trespass. {etymology: cross, traverse, infringe, violate; euphemism for “to die.”} The jump of a fence, a parallel amble along a darkly wooded driveway, a swift turn into a backroad pullout, waiting till cars have passed. Behold!
The obsession with the dilapidated is as much about eco-reclamation as it is about recognizing the house as body. Roofs with long exhales. Moss giving way to a shingled meadow. Swifts in the chimneys, bats in the walls. Doors contracted within their frame, summer swelling, winter unhinging. Sometimes, a vine like a fist around a throat, and a long wait as the home drops to its knees. Once, nothing but a brick fireplace. Out of its mantle I found a sprawling rosemary bush, and below, the dirt heavy hearth now a den of foxes, little bones littered at the mouth.
I take to photographing the yellow ones. Butter and flaxen against calla lilies and ferns. Creamy peelings, the first owner’s (now dead, body in the rural cemetery, unmarked) preference for climbing roses, camellias now left unchecked. The trembling arches of Japanese Snowballs and in the backyards, the beautiful garden sheds hugged by hellebores and foxgloves.
When I was a child there was a yellow house. On the painted porch, a small wooden rolltop desk that belonged to the original inhabitant of the home. The rolling feature stuck open, each stacked drawer exposed, like the inside of a doll house. Here, I placed my findings from the garden, the fragment of a fox skull, a northern flicker’s orange feather, the tail of a lizard.
It’s hard to say when the nest was built. Grass, sticks, mud, like a cup for eggs that eventually appeared, speckled and river green. I recall that the yolk was double hot in my mouth. I gulped
as the wood thrush pair looked on, my swallow exaggerated while they watched, though I can’t recall when or what they watched taken from me.
Erasure of Field Guide, Cornell’s All About Birds
Find This Bird You’ll likely hear the Wood Thrush before you see it. The male sings his haunting, flute-like ee-oh-lay song from the lower canopy or midstory of deciduous or mixed eastern forests. To see Wood Thrushes, look for them foraging quietly on the forest floor and digging through leaf litter. Conservation Wood Thrush are still common throughout the deciduous forests of eastern North America, but populations declined by approximately 1.3% percent per year for a cumulative decline of about 50% between 1966 and 2019, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 12 million and rates them 14 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score. Wood Thrush is included on the Yellow Watch List for birds most at risk of extinction without significant conservation actions to reverse declines and reduce threats. It is one of the most prominent examples of declining forest songbirds in North America. Some of the steepest population declines have been along the Atlantic Coast and in New England states where Wood Thrushes are most common. Habitat fragmentation on their breeding and wintering grounds is thought to be one reason for their decline. Fragmented habitats may have lower quality food choices or expose nests to predators such as raccoons, jays, crows, and domestic or feral cats, and to the Brown-headed Cowbird, which is a nest parasite. Wood Thrushes are also susceptible to the effects of acid rain, which can leach calcium from the soil, in turn robbing the birds of vital, calcium-rich invertebrate prey. In Central America, the loss of lowland tropical forests shrinks their winter habitat. Behavior One of the first songsters to be heard in the morning and among the last in the evening, the male sings his haunting ee-oh-lay song from an exposed perch in the midstory or lower canopy. He uses the song, which carries through dense forest, to establish a territory that averages a few acres. Within days, a female initiates pairing by enticing him to chase her in silent circular flights 3–6 feet above the ground. Between flights, the prospective pair shares a perch. After pairing, the female helps defend the territory from intruders. Low-level threat gestures like breast puffing, crest raising, and wing and tail flicking are usually enough. Among the alarm calls they give is a distinctive, sharp machine-gun-like sound that can be heard from far off. Wood Thrushes
forage by hopping through leaf litter on the forest floor, tossing leaves to expose insects or probing for litter-dwelling prey. While foraging, they frequently bob upright for a look around. Pairs are socially monogamous, though extra-pair copulations are common. New pairs form each year.
The Wood Thrush is a consummate songster and it can sing “internal duets” with itself. In the final trilling phrase of its three-part song, it sings pairs of notes simultaneously, one in each branch of its y-shaped syrinx, or voicebox. The two parts harmonize with each other to produce a haunting, ventriloquial sound.
…………………………………………………………………………….
When I found the little bird dead, I baked pie
after pie and hung banners from one tree to the next
to celebrate the flight in my hands, the speckle breasted enthusiasm
of someone else, who like me, wants to mate
in the dark shadow of bramble. I find myself alive again
in the quiet between a song and your ears.
Lay down, let us burn our mouths on hot berries
as the death of birds flies in and out of us, my bed covered
in field guides.
Reddit Forum, Dead Poets Bird Club r/hereandnow: Only recently discovered birding while dead. I have noticed that the silence after bird song feels more pronounced now that I am dead. I am trying hard to listen, to let go of being heard. There is a tension between poet and birder, I feel an unresolved reckoning.
Newtotheblue 3 yrs ago The bird teaches us to embrace death without reservation, to fully come dead to the beauty of the moment.
Deadlikeyou 41 yrs go Find ecstasy in death, the mere sense of dying is joy enough.
Warriorontheotherside 5 yrs ago Wherever the bird flew with no feet, she found trees with no limbs.
little_deaths 13 yrs ago I want to death and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my death. And I am horribly limited.
Dancinginthisworld 52 yrs ago Hold fast to death, for if death die, death is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
little_deaths 13 yrs ago I am not mystical: it isn’t/As if I thought it had a spirit.
Irisintheafterlife 6 mo ago Does it matter where the birds go? Does it even matter what species they are? They leave here, that’s the point, first their bodies, then their sad cries. littledeaths: I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be. Warriorontheotherside 4yrs ago
It is not our deaths that divides us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
{In order of appearance: Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Louise Glück. The words alive, live, life, living, and dreams replaced with death, dead, and dying.}
The wood thrush sings twice at once with a double syrinx. From one side of his throat: to mate. From one side of his throat: a mate. Imagine being the last bird singing after all the snails have disintegrated. The corrosion of home is always multilayered. If you have a home with rafters, look up. The spectral is heat bound, rising. The wood thrush welcomes the cowbird. Plays the ventriloquist. Trills metallic. The looping call of thrush, caught in the mouth of ghost, ringing split throated
An incomplete list of thrush species looping with types of ghosts:
Swainson’s Myling Nightingale Dullahan Hermit Muma Pādurii Green-cheeked Genius loci Scaly Bodilima Siberian Egg Song Soucouyant
Kelly Gray lives in the redwoods, nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean. Most recently, her chapbook The Mating Calls //of the// Specter was selected for the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize. Her writing can be found in Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Pithead Chapel, among other places. She is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize, the ArtSurround Cohort Grant, and a participant in the 2023 Kenyon Review Poetry Workshop. Gray’s collections, Instructions for the Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021) and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, 2022), can be found at writekgray.com.
for my brother & others who were killed during the protest on 10th October 2020. may they find the peace they fought for
i IT’S 4 O’ CLOCK in the morning. & the news is still new with guilt of names it has swallowed the night before. dawn is in a mouth full of prayers—the adhaan is calling us back from our death: ٱلصَّلَاةُ خَيْرٌ مِنَ ٱلنَّوْمِ ,ٱلصَّلَاةُ خَيْرٌ مِنَ ٱلنَّوْمِ (meaning: prayer is better than sleep, prayer is better than sleep) i am outside—pondering how each breath, like a bird, is taking flight in our throat. i look at my brother’s body, cold and bloody. silent, too—the birds are no longer birds in his neck. they have all flown into the silence of men who brought him in saying: he is a patriot, he drowned while saving his country from a turbulent wave. Dear Lord, the origin of wounds is never the flesh, it’s the hand holding a weapon. & I just can’t forgive this betrayal.
ii
—maybe, the bullet will come seeking home in my bones, too, eating through whatever chunk of flesh will put up a shield against its entrance. maybe not.
iii truth is: i still carry my brother’s wound, fresh and bloody, on my flesh. a bullet wound is only a broken river recreating itself in our reflection.
iv
it’s the evening before: say 6pm before the bullet seeks home in your body. before the night becomes filled with its essence. the sun is reclining towards darkness. & the birds are no longer birds—they are seeking refuge in our grief. there’s no hope for the current generation, you had said, looking at me like you meant me. your eyes press against the sadness walking in mine. three days before, we had listened to the news of young men been harassed by policemen. some shot. & killed. i close my eyes all day to see what it means to live as a corpse. if i walk through the darkness in my eyelid, can i feel myself dying? what is death if not a form of hunger, visible only to the closest hour? what is dying if not how to step into the wilderness of want, into the glory that one will burn forever?
v this is a poem
this is a poem in which a body interviews its death. this is a poem in which every metaphor is about the vanity of survival. this is a poem about my country. this poem is a stage & i represent all the death that has passed through my body as survival. the music playing in me is silence & my body is opening doors wherever the silence touches what i mean to say i am listening to the sound of ghosts as they break through my body into a field of purple lilacs, stained with reds. what i mean to say is i’m listening to my brother’s last word before his skull broke into bullets:
stay here, where every hand is a second closer to safety
i’m watching his blood turn into the red sea—stretching towards me. the music has stopped but this poem knows no end. silence, they say, is what begins and end language. forgive me, i’m still a budding poet, what do i know?
vi
IT’S BEEN 4 YEARS. but isn’t it true that sadness means the body will only forgive but not forget the closing of wounds, will not forget the betrayal of the flesh? i & my new lover, sits on a table at a beach festival— quietude like a stray bullet finds its way in between us. A girl beside our table, pointing at me says, i am surprised he is finally going on a date, she continues, i have known him for years, he is always weeping for his country or his dead brother or his sister in his poems. & i mean to say to her: tell me more, girl. tell me about how every poem blooming in my head is a deserted road & i’m a lonely river following whatever path calls it home.
vii
Note to reader: while writing this poem/ a war is replaying in my head/ & the sound of my keyboards sounds like the continuous triggers of a gun/ i promise/ i’m not hearing the sounds of ghost again/ i am only begging the rain not to rust the garden of roses behind my window/ same way i am asking my country/ to spare my ghost another year of survival/
(un)becoming a country: Nigeria as a case study; August 2023
after reading Angel Nafis
1912: a country was named after a river, named after drowning say, nigeria and we plunge headfirst into the terror of foreign tongues 1960: the guest left, & we sang country the guest left, & we sang water the guest left & we drowned in our violence how do you glorify a river if not to drown in its existence? 1970: the war left us, the war stayed with us say, the only way to stay alive is to become one with the violence that dwells in us. 2020: my country does not spare a flickering thing my country men, flickering things, moths dancing near a fire in other words, we are scared of death but home seems so familiar
2050: My grandson says to put home on a gamble & you will learn how to carve stars into the barren sky . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
this poem will not end because i intend to end it with hope
Fasasi Ridwan (he/him), whose works have appeared/are forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Lucent Dreaming, Afrihill Press, SprinNg, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere, is a Nigerian poet of Yoruba descent. He is a member of The Swan Collective. His works have been shortlisted for the SprinNg Annual Poetry Contest, Splendor of Dawn Poetry Contest, SOBAF Poetry Slam, and also longlisted for the Akachi Prize for Literature. Find him on twitter (sorry X) @Ibn_Yushau44.
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