Why does it recur to me ever oftener One Evenfall Dell, its Brook and Firs? One Star peers fathomably lower And dawns on me: from thence in silence I transfer.
Then I am drawn far from good Mortals. What could embitter me solely so? The Bells catch on to their tolls, And starts the Star to glissando.
Oft
Warum erscheint mir immer wieder Ein Abendtal, sein Bach und Tannen? Es blickt ein Stern verständlich nieder Und sagt mir: wandle still von dannen.
Dann zieh ich fort von guten Leuten. Was konnte mich nur so verbittern? Die Glocken fangen an zu läuten, Und der Stern beginnt zu zittern.
Evening Bound
Will no lovelier Bird sing? Each Scrub remains voiceless. Only an Imago with flowerful Wings Revels round the Field of abounding Ryegrass.
Sunflowers kneel back down to Earth. Tanned Shadows cling to the nigh Wall: Grave, sweat-soaked Horses pull forth, Through the lowering Land, high Hauls.
Gegen Abend
Will kein lieber Vogel singen? Alle Büsche bleiben stumm. Nur ein Falter mit beblümten Schwingen Tummelt sich im Roggenfeld herum.
Sonnenblumen neigen sich zur Erde. Braune Schatten haschen nach der Wand: Schweißbesickert ziehen schwere Pferde Hohe Fuhren durchs verwolkte Land.
Translator’s Note:
Like much of Theodor Däubler’s lyric poetry, “Oft” and “Evening Bound” both distill and cavort in the mythopoetic light and shadow cast by his epic literary debut, Das Nordlicht (The Northern Lights). Däubler describes the central image of auroral light as celestial odyssey in these exuberant terms:
I was overjoyed to feel that the earth contained within it much of the sun and this solar element combined with us to fight against gravity, striving to joined once more with the sun. … There is a gleaming penetration between that sun which has been released from the bonds of earth and the divine sun itself – and this causes the polar light within the month long darkness of the poles! The earth is longing to become a radiant star again (translation by Raymond Furness from his book Zarathustra’s Children).
In “Evening Bound,” polar opposites (light and darkness, earth/chthonian and heavens/ethereality, death and revival, singularity and community) are both bound together and released, leveraged as an image of transformative flight, and perhaps as a departure from an everyday process of binary thought and identity. The Imago at the center of the poem is drawn from the German word “Falter,” which can either refer to a moth or a butterfly depending on the time of day. Those who pin down winged insects may be called Lepidopterists, though the term “Aurelian” is archaic designation for them, drawn from the fleeting golden color of the beings who emerge from an aurelia, or chrysalis. Since “Evening Bound” is set during the liminality of twilight, or the golden hour if you prefer, I landed on the word “Imago” to preserve the union of opposites I felt in Däubler’s use of ambiguity, for he could have chosen one of the more definitive terms for this image: Tagfalter or day-flyer (butterfly) and Nachfalter or night-flyer (moth). Imago also carries a psychic charge: it refers to an unconscious idealized image of some figure that holds sway over one’s actions, such as a parent, or, in Däubler’s heliocentric cosmology, our closest radiating star, the animating sun.
Along those same lines, the speaker of “Oft” appears to me in a kind of liminal orbit, recalling either an apotheosis or exile from humanity that tightens as rebounds. I found it difficult to align musical and imagistic sense in English, especially in the second and fourth lines in both stanzas. In the first stanza, rather than “Firs,” I originally preferred “Pines” for its underground resonance as yearning; though I think both words, when felled, can be traversed as bridges to solstice traditions that center eternal light. Firs has a rhyming advantage with “transfer,” which is how I translate the two-fold ambiguity of the verb “wandle” here: it compresses the action of walking with that of transforming, another resonance of departing. This tension, including my own faltering towards Däubler’s music, is what led me to hear an operatic richness in the shuddering and trembling of “zittern,” the original poem’s final word.
Theodor Däubler (1876-1934) is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, prose, and art criticism, including The Starchild, The Starlit Path, With Silver Sickle, Hymn to Italy, The New Standpoint, and his debut epic The Northern Lights. Däubler served as the chair of the German PEN club, was awarded the Goethe Medal, and in 1928 was nominated for Nobel prize in literature. Portrait by Hugo Erfurth.
Sean Zhuraw’s poetry and translations have appeared in Boston Review, The Hopkins Review, Tin House, The Offing, Defunct, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He earned degrees from Columbia and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he won the John Logan poetry prize. He teaches English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Philadelphia. He lives gayly in West Philly with his husband and two cats. His Instagram is @toystutter.
a forced landing that forces me to spend six hours in Kiev when the plane approaches the runway and it seems we’re entering a storage site that leads to other sites more sophisticated more lonely more sad Too much has been written already about people forced to stay in one place forced to leave without explanation forced to flee a forced geography genetically modified foods forced to abandon their essence
I am from K a forced country She speaks in statistics and can’t stop staring at an Orthodox Jewish family dragging several kids and a bunch of suitcases
The number of dead has now surpassed the number of those who struggle for the liberation of any forced country of the world Which side are you from? from the ones who travel out of necessity or curiosity? who remove cartridges projectiles mines? leave messages decode decompose? stockpile gunpowder?
From the ones who burn or are burned? From the military-technical cooperation? From the United Nations or NATO? From the photograph of a country that isn’t a country? From the postcard? From the botany of not taking sides with anyone? From the seeds of flowers that have no territory? From laboratories? From experiments? From cellular chemistry? From the contaminated nation?
From all the girls with eyebrows mapped out like solar systems that live inside of me
To be or not to be is not a dilemma but rather to align with an army on one side or the other–of the river Jordan
I like knowing there’s someone else walking inside of me like an anchor-dog inside my footprints a built-in spirit who steps and coughs along with me who falls down and gets back up who corrects me feeds me and sees me in the forced future [its parade of dust] my prehistoric side I used to stand at the door of my house waiting for the moment of detachment eye contact with that other part
a forced root listening to itself grow doesn’t listen to the house invaded by other forced roots to be sympathetic
They came to Lima to study they brought their neon colors and music in order to multiply and grow they picked a piece of land or invented it or invaded it and perhaps afterwards they also invented the river surrounded by stones without water maybe even the house
Poetry sold whatever was expelled by the air it nourished the scraps that denied its own existence filled silences with the strategies of an architect who empties cities poetry wanted beauty they wanted cleanliness it trundled a wheelbarrow that filled up with ideals and mirrors forced to dispense with the basics: oxygen and water I saw myself transporting those who were wounded by its words
I healed their lesions brought them back to the world of broken wings brought them back to the demands of the market
I used to ask my father and not my mother she was worse off to sharpen the knives Poetry walked all day long pushing her discordant machine trailed by her grandson who was learning the trade and served as her eyes her Andean eyes had such small hands but everything: oxygen and water fit into her depths he was the future but I called him her eyes the eyes of poetry that looked at the present
The woman says we refer to god with the words of god in other words there’s a language for pleasure a special vocabulary for defining nuclear waste there’s electricity if you can pay for it pleasure but the census doesn’t talk about that god and pleasure like first love like the first time they become a drowned chorus
She’ll improvise a vocabulary for pleasure from her hands I’ll take the air the butterflies I’ll save my breath to explain to the soldier that his statistics are useless there’s no way to justify massacres femicides corruption homophobia endangered species that with any luck will be turned into sheets of stickers
A plan to industrialize Chernobyl should include maximum security for investors discretion and a country forced to endure it
The woman says I am a forced country showing off her muscle yes I can she is neither tall nor blonde doesn’t wear a turban and she won’t say it in English there’s a distance though she is right in front of me that’s all there’s a distance that reminds me of what we forget when living in a forced country
Before god there were few words She says there was god before
Este es un viaje forzado
un aterrizaje forzado que me obliga a pasar seis horas en Kiev cuando el avión se acerca a la pista de aterrizaje y parece que entramos a un almacén que conduce a otros almacenes más sofisticados más solitarios más tristes Se ha escrito demasiado sobre gente forzada a quedarse en un lugar forzada a partir sin explicación forzada a dejar geografía forzada alimentos genéticamente manipulados forzados a abandonar su ser
Soy de K un país forzado Ella habla en estadísticas no le quita la mirada a una familia judío-ortodoxa que arrastra varios niños y muchas maletas
El número de muertos es tal que sobrepasa a los que lucharán por la independencia de cualquier país forzado del mundo ¿De qué lado estás? ¿del que viaja por curiosidad o por necesidad? ¿remueve cartuchos proyectiles minas? ¿deja mensajes descifra descompone? ¿acumula pólvora?
¿De los que queman o son quemados? ¿De la cooperación técnico-militar? ¿De la United Nations o de la OTAN? ¿De la fotografía del país que no es el país? ¿De la postal? ¿De la botánica de no tomar partido por nadie? ¿De las semillas de las flores que no conocen de territorios? ¿De los laboratorios? ¿De los experimentos? ¿De la química celular? ¿De la nación impura?
De todas las muchachitas con las cejas demarcadas como sistemas solares que habitarán en mí Ser o no ser no es un dilema sino alinearse en un ejército de un lado o del otro del río Jordán
Me gusta saber que hay alguien más que camina en mí como un perro ancla en mis huellas un ánima pegadita que pisa y tose después de mí que se cae y se levanta que me corrige que me alimenta que me ve en el futuro forzado [su desfile de polvo] mi lado fósil yo me paraba en la puerta de mi casa a esperar ese desprendimiento el contacto visual con mi otra parte
una raíz forzada escuchándose crecer no escucha la casa invadida por otras raíces forzadas a ser simpáticas
Llegaron a Lima para estudiar trajeron los colores fosforescentes y la música para multiplicarse y crecer eligieron un campo o lo inventaron o lo invadieron y quizás entonces también inventaron el río rodeado de piedras sin agua y la casa
La poesía vendía lo que expulsaba el aire alimentaba la chatarra que le negaba un lugar
llenaba los silencios con la estrategia del arquitecto que vaciará ciudades quería belleza querían limpieza empujaba una carretilla que llenó de ideales y espejitos forzada a prescindir de lo fundamental: oxígeno y agua me imaginaba trasladando a los heridos de esas palabras les curaba los hoyos y los devolvía al mundo de las alas rotas los devolvía a la necesidad del mercado
Le pedía a mi padre y no a mi madre a ella le tocó la peor parte que afilara los cuchillos La poesía caminaba todo el día empujando su máquina desafinadora seguida de su nieto que aprendía el oficio y era sus ojos sus ojos aindiados tenían unas manos pequeñas pero todo: oxígeno y agua cabían en su profundidad era el futuro pero yo le llamaba sus ojos eran los ojos de la poesía que miraban el presente
La mujer dice a dios te refieres con las palabras de dios en otras palabras hay un idioma para el placer hay un vocabulario especial para definir residuos nucleares hay electricidad para el que paga hay placer pero de eso no habla la encuesta dios y placer como el primer amor como la primera vez se transforman en un coro ahogado
Ella improvisará un vocabulario para el placer de sus manos tomaré el aire las mariposas dejaré lo preciso para explicarle al soldado que sus estadísticas no sirven no hay forma de justificar masacres feminicidios corrupción homofobia especies en extinción que con suerte convertirán en láminas stickers
Un plan para industrializar Chernóbil debería incluir máxima seguridad para los inversionistas discreción y un país forzado a soportarlo
La mujer dice soy un país forzado mostrando el músculo yes I can no es alta ni rubia no usa turbante ni lo dirá en inglés hay una distancia aunque está frente a mí that´s all hay una distancia que me recuerda lo que se olvida viviendo en un país forzado
Antes de dios había pocas palabras Ella dice antes estaba dios
Translators’ Note:
Roxana Crisólogo’s latest book Kauneus: la belleza (Beauty) is a distinguished collection of provocative and formally innovative poems that give voice to the alienation and ironies of exile and migration—within a leftist framework that is embedded within the global struggle against structural racism and inequality. Set in Peru, Finland, and other regions from Mozambique to Palestine to Turkey, the poems offer a transnational, intergenerational feminist poetic, irrigated from the vein of 20th century defeats.
The challenging yet beautiful sequences in Kauneus delve into her family’s experience of internal displacement, replicated across Peru which has seen waves of migrants leaving rural communities in search of opportunities in Lima. Crisólogo brings this diasporic sensibility as she writes about other “forced countries” and the refugees who flee poverty, violence, and climate catastrophe.
One of the challenges of translating these poems that others have deemed as “untranslatable” is the swift thematic upheavals, the ever-shifting subjectivities, and the rhetorical leaps that mark her style. While not inaccessible at the level of grammar, the poems are multivalent and invite a synaptic, intuitive reading. Having studied law, Crisólogo deploys then subverts an ironic form of ‘legalese,’ drawing attention to the thick cushion of illogic that undergirds the dichotomies between the global north and the global south. Ultimately the seemingly unrelated strands coalesce into a mosaic that is both figurative and abstract.
Judith and I have spent a great deal of time and care in rendering the complexities and the lyrical dexterity of these sometimes-bewildering texts, especially this one and its complex middle section, which Crisólogo would describe as muy, pero muy aindiado: I mean really Andean/Indian/Indigenous.
Roxana Crisólogo is a poet, translator, and cultural director who studied law. Her books of poetry include Abajo sobre el cielo (Lima, 1999) whose Finnish translation was published by Kääntöpiiri, Helsinki, 2001; Animal del camino (Lima, 2001); Ludy D (Lima, 2006); Trenes (Mexico, 2010, republished by Ediciones Libros del Cardo, Chile in 2019); and Eisbrecher (Icebreaker) Hochroth Verlag (Berlin, 2017). An anthology of her poetry has been translated into Italian, Sotto sopra il cielo (Down above the Sky) was published by Seri Editore. Kauneus: la belleza (Intermezzo Tropical, Lima, 2021) is her latest book of poetry, republished by Ediciones Nebliplateada, Buenos Aires, 2023. Crisólogo is the founder of Sivuvalo Platform, a multilingual literature association based in Helsinki. She was president of the association of Finnish left-wing artists and writers, Kiila. She was recently awarded a grant from the Finnish Kone Foundation to work on the Sivuvalo project. Crisólogo literary work and projects have been supported by the Finnish foundations, Kone Foundation, Finnish Literature Exchange, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Kari Mattila Säätiö and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. She lives and works in Helsinki. (Photo: Dirk Skiba)
Kim Jensen is a Baltimore-based writer, poet, educator, and translator who has lived in California, France, and Palestine. Her books include an experimental novel, The Woman I Left Behind, and two collections of poems, Bread Alone and The Only Thing that Matters. Active in transnational peace and social justice movements for decades, Kim’s writings have been featured in Transition,International Human Rights Arts Festival, Another Chicago Magazine, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Extraordinary Rendition: Writers Speak Out on Palestine, Gaza Unsilenced, Bomb Magazine, Sukoon, Mizna, Revista el Humo, Left Curve, Liberation Literature, and many others. In 2001, she won the Raymond Carver Award for short fiction. Kim is currently professor of English and Creative Writing at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she co-founded an interdisciplinary literacy initiative that demonstrates the vital connection between classroom learning and social justice in the broader community.
Judith Santopietro is a Mexican writer who was awarded the writing residency at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2022. She was a finalist for the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation for her book Tiawanaku. Poems from the Mother Coqa, translated by Ilana Dann Luna. She has published in the Anuario de Poesía Mexicana 2006 (Fondo de Cultura Económica), Rio Grande Review, and The Brooklyn Rail, andhas also participated in the PEN America’s World Voices Festival in New York in 2018. Santopietrohas carried out research residencies in the Sierra de Zongolica and Tecomate, Veracruz; theTeresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Texas; and the University of Leiden, The Netherlands; as well as in New York and Bolivia. She is writing a novel on indigenous migrationin the US, and a documentary poetry book on enforced disappearance in Mexico.
I place before you this phantom image of my childhood, a sweater vest, patched trousers, a crooked-collared shirt, a smile (wide as a stork’s wing), olives without meat, cheese heavy with mold, jelly with no fruit, a half-empty jar of nutella, my mother’s half-full cup of coffee, the quarter for my school snack, a tin of snuff (the absentmindedness of my father). there ought to be more on this table (propped with beer coasters), but I will leave it at that, the rest is the work of this poem
still as water / wary as wood is of fire / I remained hidden / in the depths of the well / under a heavy crust
I place before you this late pubescent fragment, place an adolesence in your lap. don’t try to tame it, to wash it, to comb its hair, to understand. let the circus animal behind these words howl. lay it down on the window sill, it needs to sleep, and dream, it needs to fashion the whisper of maple leaves with its paws. leave it be, it is worn from recounting, from walking through all the chambers of this palace, from the dueling voices that burrow through this poetry journal. the smell of burned toast will lead you there
in the hands of the living I am now open / peeled with the knife of time’s polyphony! / every word becomes a test of courage / every glance a narrowing of your eyes
I place a curse on these words (skin flourished with tattoos) and leave it there, I set about crafting the wings of the kite, my father says … I’ll come back, promise …
you will bind my hands / sew my mouth closed / but this heart / that sobs behind life / thirsts for naked fingers and toes / you can never sooth it again / now that it has sold itself
The epic of Hera
She lay down under the pine and gave birth to me with my umbilical cord she was blindfolded the afterbirth streamed through blades of grass all the way down to our doorstep she rested her head on the ivory she numbed her pain with the vernix and lay like an injured mare under this pine tree
every night my father left his wife / every night in her fury she wanted to tear him limb from limb, he returned after she fell asleep / she slept soundly spent from crying tired to the bone / every night the radio cries with songs of home / I lie in bed with a chalky fever / for a bid of lust she was impregnated, for a pretty dress, for a faraway land, for a bridal veil without a wedding
she bore me and then her death began now I am the accursed fruit of her ravaged garden the razor slit in her milky skin I am the one, the bow, the arrow, the court, and the executioner failure itself, the betrayal, the victim the unintelligible voice
every night she arrives with her blindfolded eyes / climbs from the coach, given over to an unknown destination / every night we fall asleep to these acts / one cries, the other flees, no one finds a home / every night I write poems to rouse my thoughts / slink past tracks, past cheap brothels, absorbed in my world / because every night my father left my mother / every night in her fury she wanted to tear him limb from limb / now I know, everyone should fear their own birth
she bore me, then her death began she drank the three thousand year old poison of motherhood and lay herself down under the pine I am the ivory beneath her head the guard at her doorstep the razor and the stitches across her wound mother, forgive me I have completed my work
Translator’s Note:
Silence is a phantom. It seeps through windows, slips through pores, fills tiny and vast rooms, unnoticed perhaps until a child goes to the breakfast table and everything on it reminds of what is not there, loved ones whose care is apparent in absence, whose love is expressed in the jars and tins of loneliness, everything half full, half empty. And the devastating recognition by the child, grown to adulthood, that he was unintentionally culpable, that as loved as he was, he was a silencer too by his mere presence, that “no one finds a home” where economic issues dictate the household. These two poems by German poet, Dinçer Güçyeter, move in this space of emptiness: a child at a table populated by symbols of family, and a mother whose individuality ceases with the birth of that child, and finally as time continues, with a poet instilled with “dueling voices that burrow through this poetry journal.”
I myself was what used to be called a “latchkey child” in 1970s lingo until so many children “came home to an empty house” that the buzzword rendered itself irrelevant. I remember wishing my mother were home to make me an after-school snack and at the same time feeling capable at meeting my own needs, in a kind of conflicted lonely independence that carries through into my ever advancing adulthood. Never once though did I consider what effect my mere presence had on my mother in such a concrete fashion. Güçyeter’s desire, urge, imperative to speak out on both counts, to reenact the scenes of silence are a vehicle for both indictment and remorse, representing attempts perhaps to exorcise the phantom.
The poetry collection these come from, titled My Prince, I am the Ghetto, is a multi-modal lyric collage grounded in the poet’s autobiography. In excavations of memory and depictions of social realities for Germans of all ethnicities, dialog pervades every poem, every poetic cycle, every altered image, every theme the book addresses. Like in “The Kitchen Table” and “The Epic of Hera,” many poems in the collection are made up of two or three parts, each voice and gaze in conversation with its phantom self, just as the world they are revealing has an acknowledged surface and an undercurrent of silence. Güçyeter does the talking for both sides, until perhaps the day when the phantoms come back to the metaphorical table in physical form and real-world dialog happens.
Dinçer Güçyeter grew up as the son of a barkeeper and a blue-collar worker. He went to night school to finish his high school diploma. From 1996 to 2000, he trained to be a tool and die maker. Occasionally, he worked in the food service industry. In 2012, Güçyeter founded Elif Verlag, a publishing house focused on poetry, financed by his part-time job as a forklift driver. His latest poetry collection, Mein Prinz, ich bin das Ghetto, won the Peter Huchel Prize in 2022. His first novel, Unser Deutschlandmärchen, was published in the fall of 2022 by Mikrotext.
Caroline Wilcox Reul is the translator of In the morning we are glass, by Andra Schwarz (Zephyr Press, 2021) and Who Lives by Elisabeth Borchers (Tavern Books, 2017), both from the German. Her translations have appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, The Los Angeles Review, Exchanges, Waxwing, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Columbia Journal, and others.
You herald the gray backstage, the light’s atole advancing, thickening and everything spoils in the stiffness of eight gravestone columns. Foolish soup mondongo, revoltijo the thick broth in which we come back to life
Master of restlessness: leave the bed where lovers sleep the cloud where Mariana breathes far from this world.
Lord of insomnia: you and your ilk reign over the basilisk and the cockatrice. don’t be a beast. grant us some rest.
Give us at least a while five more minutes delay the morning cease your singing! Chicken hearted third-rate feathered tenor Shut your beak!
Plegaria contra el gallo
Enemigo del sueño, rival de los que sueñan.
Lo que anuncias: entretelones de grisura, el atole de la luz que avanza espesa y todo lo corrompe en el rigor de sus ocho columnas lapidarias. La sopa boba, el mondongo, el revoltijo: el caldo gordo en que volvemos a la vida.
Patrón de la vigilia: aléjate del lecho en que duermen los amantes y de la nube en que respira Marianna ajena al mundo.
Señor de los desvelos: tú que prohíjas en tu estirpe al basilisco y al cocatrix, no seas bestia, concédenos reposo.
Regálanos al menos otro rato, cinco minutos más, retrasa la mañana. Detén tu canto, corazón de pollo, Emplumado tenor de poca monta, ¡cierra el pico!
Translator’s Note:
The element that I continue to find most striking about Cabrera’s poetry is his ability to put concepts, experiences, and works of art from seemingly different universes (that is to say parts of the world, traditions, languages, and levels of social prestige) into dialogue with one another. In the two poems included here, everyday occurrences, like the crowing of a rooster or a stack of books being placed in a box labelled as eggs, serve as gateways for a range of emotions from metalinguistic and metaliterary reflection to existential angst. In each poem, ordinary domestic life (like arranging furniture while moving or waking up in the morning) engages in conversations with mythology, philosophy, religion, and linguistics.
In addition to Cabrera’s wide breadth of conceptual dialogues, his poems are also extremely well-crafted and detailed. In my translation of “Pandora’s Box Blues,” I evoke Cabrera’s rhyme scheme at times, while deviating from it in some sections. Specifically, I maintain the rhyme scheme when the poem shows how language can be used to establish order, and I drift away from the rhyme scheme when the poem shows how language can also create chaos. In “Supplication against the Rooster,” I highlight the elevated register and humorous tone of the poem. In addition to the juxtaposition of unlikely ideas and references, Cabrera’s humor is another one of my favorite elements in his poems.
Víctor Cabrera is a poet and editor originally from Arriaga in the Chiapas State of Mexico. He is the author of many volumes of poetry including Signos de traslado (2007), Wide Screen (2009), Un jardín arrasado de cenizas (2014), and Mística del hastío (2017). Cabrera edited and wrote the introduction to the collected edition David Huerta: Poesía moderna (2019). Cabrera is a recipient of the Fondo National para la Cultura y los Artes (FONCA) scholarship. He works as an editor for the university press (Dirección general de publicaciones) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
James Richie holds a Master of Arts in Language, Literature, and Translation from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His translations have appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation, Four Centuries: Russian Poetry in Translation, and [Sic] a Journal of Literature, Culture, and Literary Translation. His academic writing has appeared in Translation Review and Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, and Culture. He is currently pursuing his PhD with the Department of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville.
We got our report cards back last night. Apparently, the teacher had called you in for a talk. You stepped into the schoolyard dressed in the general’s uniform – the tall papakha hat made of astrakhan fur, the stiff navy overcoat, and the epaulets with tassels hanging off your shoulders. The sixth-grade girls were swooning onto the cement while I watched you with vile indifference, clenching my teeth on a koulouri bagel, the sesame kind that disgusts you. Showno respect, I promised myself, Absolutelyno nostalgia, I will not run to him, I’ve held my breath for six months, will not cave in the finale, I swore, where I pinky-promised my own heart. I took a bite of the koulouri as big as your throat and stuffed my mouth with sesame so you’d be repulsed but also think, Fuck Volga and all of Lake Baikal, I want her, even with all that sesame. You marched closer and closer but wouldn’t arrive, with every stride you grew by a head and I shrunk by two. Finally, you loomed over me, your golden Brandenburg buttons shining so bright I was blinded, but I played it cool, turned my back to you and started up the stairs, swaying my ass in your face because I could sense you were hell-bent, a brewing storm.
The poor teacher bowed to you like a slave and you blessed him with a pat on the back like a horse you had broken and brutalized. He offered you a piece of paper with trembling hands and retreated slightly so the crossfire wouldn’t catch him. You looked at it, looked at it, looked at it, looked at me, I looked at you, you looked at it again, I gave you a smile (whoops), you swelled, cleared your throat, concentrated, I pretended to concentrate, you looked at me and told him:
“Fine.”
The poor teacher exhaled.
“As you can perceive,” he said, wiping his sweaty forehead, “we didn’t accomplish very much this semester. To apply even more precision in my meaning, Mr. General, we hit rock bottom. All the progressions and developments we had gained in previous years have gone straight to hell. Compare and contrast, if you please. Behold last semester’s perfect 10s. Now observe how the forlorn 10s have been orphaned from their 1s. We’re talking about a mass uno-cide here. All that remains are these utterly round 0s, particularly in the fundamental prowesses required of a modern lady: Independence, Ambition, Etiquette and Charm! Six months ago, who could have foreseen this occurrence occurring for our young lady? The epitome of moxie at this institution, our champion in the crusade against the patriarchy, the undisputable frontrunner in the National Competition of Competitiveness. We’re talking about a colossal calamity here. The young lady has not successfully generated a thing for months now. She states she doesn’t trust words anymore. She states that words are – forgive me, Mr. General, this is her phrasing – Giant whores. She says, What have words ever done for me? Her productive output has been eviscerated, her professionalism irrevocably impaired. She disregards one deadline after the other, blaming the full moon or the ‘southerly wind’ blowing in. She infuriates whoever she encounters, insists on the futility of everything, flaunts her exhaustion. She compulsively employs the phrase Fuck it, not to mention the phrase – verbatim, Mr. General, verbatim – Suck my balls, which she supplements at times with a graphic gesture. What is more, she requested an exemption from the course on Self-Actualization, presenting a stack of freelancing invoices as her entire argument. So I inquire to you, good Mr. General, to what do you attribute these sudden changes in our young mademoiselle?”
You didn’t look at me – instead, you bowed your head, heavy with guilt. As if you were addressing me, you parted your lips and murmured:
“I’m sorry. I’ve been away.”
A true gentleman. You didn’t rat me out. You didn’t say the self-possessed cunt exiled me. You didn’t say Miss Sataness rebelled all over the weight of my back. You didn’t tell him the rebellion had failed and ruined her, the moron. You took full responsibility. Apologized. You were away at the frontier, you explained. In Manchuria. After that, imprisoned by the Reds in Ekaterinograd. You would’ve loved to have supervised me but couldn’t. You went through a lot, dot dot dot… Unbuttoning your shirt, you revealed the wound on your chest I inflicted at that musty bar in Mani last year. The poor teacher gasped in the face of your manly courage. When you closed your shirt, I could breathe again… You promised him this wouldn’t happen again, promised improvement. Once again, sorry. The poor teacher attempted to kiss your hand, but you swatted him off with your famous noblesseandexited the classroom, harrowed but ever tall. I slipped the poor teacher the 10 euros he deserved (it would’ve been 50, like we agreed, if he had said, “Please, take care of her, your hands are the hands that need to nurture her,” but he didn’t).
You grabbed my arm and yanked me, furious, down the stairs. We crossed the schoolyard, hand-in-arm, stepping over the corpses of girls charmed to death, until we reached the sidewalk by the street and you dropped my hand, as if it wasn’t yours anymore. As soon as we turned the corner, you stopped, looked to me, and quietly said:
“What am I going to do with you? That’s all I have.”
Behind you, an SUV raced by at full speed, and as it veered the corner I wished it would flip over and crush us. No luck. You’ve got a battalion of men to keep alive, you said, you can’t send them all to hell for me. You have responsibilities, obligations, horses, ideologies, behests from the Tzar, a sick sister. You didn’t expect this from me. Where were my perfect 10s? That’s why you tripped and fell in love with me—because I didn’t need anyone. That’s what you said, and I saw the shame sinking in as you let it slip out.
I looked at you, looked at you, looked at you. You were ashamed. I took out a pair of small scissors and started tearing off your distinctions and medals, the insignia, the epaulets with the tassels hanging off your shoulders. You didn’t react, only looked left and right to confirm nobody was watching, that we weren’t becoming a spectacle. You performed your famous patience, the act of the great martyr, finally left with a jacket full of holes and a few bleeding cuts, but still, you neither flinched nor complained. I slapped you hard and you didn’t blink an eye, kneed you hard but you didn’t give me the satisfaction of folding in two. You just stood there, motionless, waiting for the storm to pass. Then, I began digging a hole like a rabid dog around your feet to bury you alive, falling inside as I dug deeper. Once the hole was up to your throat, I stopped, now eye-level with the ground, the hole eating me whole. You then hooked me under my armpits, lifted me from this upright grave, like a premature kitten from the litter, and set me on the ground in front of your face. “Feel better?” you said.
Unflinching I looked right at you and saw the blade of your sword casting a spear of light onto my throat, an offering to the gods of this world to save your battalion. I bowed my head, so that the metal could slice the meat of my flesh without effort. You love me, you said, but this must be done, I’m sorry. I nodded, bowing my head even lower because the blade had only hit my bone and it needed more strength than the strength you had. “I believe in you, you are strong. Next semester, you will have 10s again,” I heard you murmur while my head was falling – thud – on the ground.
I picked up my 0s, my books, the trophies from your uniform, and turned to leave. Then came the girls – the wives, the daughters, the secretaries, the dociles — they wrapped you in their coats, took your temperature, kissed you on the forehead, wiped the sweat from your brow, and chanted: “Shhhh, Mr. General, calm down, it’s over, don’t fatigue yourself any longer, unwind in our hands, rest here.” They bandaged your wounds with their hair, sneered at me as I walked away. For a long time as I drifted, I could smell the burning carcasses slaughtered in your honor – man, honorable father, courageous, above and beyond the call of duty, savior of the battalion, the saint who slayed the dragon. I was going and going, dragging myself with my hands, my knees, my teeth, crying bile and spitting ashes. Kids on the street giggled with glee, the order of the world had been restored, charred flesh having relieved the stomachs of your concerned congregation. Mr. General, I didn’t know what to do with myself either, nor did I have any choice but to keep walking and—though slaughtered by your hands, or rather exactly because of it—to excel once again.
Translator’s Note:
Inside is a short story called το σφάγιο (2019), translated as “The Offering.” The Greek title, meaning “the sacrifice,” is a neuter noun in Greek, evoking an objectification or animal-ification of the subject. The author, Alexandra K*, invents neologisms, plays with temporality, and creates a complex and confusing central relationship between the narrator and Mr. General.
Alexandra K*’s impact in Greek culture ignites from the biting intellectual and erotic maneuvers her writing takes through the nature of heterosexual relationships within the patriarchal order. In part, her work explores the dichotomies assigned to limit women’s behavior in patriarchy and the way complex womanhood causes tension between women and men, women and society, women and themselves.
In translating this piece, I considered how to preserve the surrealist world-building created by Alexandra in the Greek, which is essential to how the axis between women and men operates. The irreverent tone of the work, composed through moments of confusion and humor, provides a dreamscape where the logical and illogical meet and mesh, exposing the play between gender and power as the farce that it can be.
Moments where new words or novel images are invented in the Greek decidedly required the most tender attention from this translator. Such instances include when the narrator “pinky-promised [her] own heart;” when she digs a hole with her hands that swallows Mr. General and her whole; when the poor teacher discusses the “uno-cide” which has caused the narrator’s grades to go from 10s to 0s in classes like “Independence, Ambition, Etiquette and Charm.” These parts bring the reader as close to the narrator as possible. They indoctrinate without apology the audience into her way of perceiving reality, in all that makes it ridiculous. I chose to embrace invention. Leaning into the tension between dreaming and reality, I allowed the space between the two states to exist on a razor’s edge, instead of trying to tease them apart. This tension demonstrates what is at stake for the narrator, who is teetering on the edge of two paths.
“The Offering” describes the journey from teetering to severing, literally, when she bows her head for decapitation, cutting ties with Mr. General, and thus, this version of the world, which was constructed according to her relationship with him. Though it is painful, though she does not know where she is going, she now has no “choice but to keep walking and—though slaughtered by [his] hands, or rather exactly because of it—to excel once again.” By resisting clarity and honoring what is surprising, a relationship between reader and text blooms wherein reader is trusted to unravel the details and discern the dynamics at play. “The Offering” offers new language to consider what is already ridiculous by daring to reconstruct what is already constructed: gendered roles and the power they yield.
Alexandra K* (Corfu, 1985) is an author, playwright, and screenwriter based in Athens. Focusing on issues of gender and class, and experimenting heavily with language and form, her work has been described as irreverent, uncanny, and “disturbingly honest.” She was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa International Writing Program (’21) and has been repeatedly commissioned by the Greek National Opera, the National Broadcasting Company, the Athens-Epidaurus Festival, and the National Theatre of Greece. Her most recent commissions from the latter two institutions, respectively, include milk, blood (after Euripides’ Medea) and Revolutionary Ways to Clean Your Swimming Pool, which has been widely translated and received a EURODRAM award. She’s a regular contributor in Vogue Greece and teaches Creative Writing workshops at the University of Western Macedonia. She published the best-selling novel How Sea Urchins Kiss in 2017,and her latest book, Mother Mary Smoking in the Bathroom, a short story collection published in May 2023, became an instant #1 bestseller in Greece.
Hannah Kent is a translator, poet, and performing artist from Key West, FL. She earned an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa for her work translating ancient Greek poets and philosophers, during which time she also served as an editor and communications expert with the translation journal Ancient Exchanges. She was a team leader and political canvasser in New Hampshire for the 2022 primary elections, and now she’s based in New York City, ghostwriting memoirs and autobiographies. Find her @pol_udora.
We open on SOL,14, Chicana Japanese mix, staring into an adjacent room: a dress making studio.
In the center of the dark, finished goth-inspired QUINCEAÑERA DRESS on a DRESS FORM.
A BEEPING ALARM grabs Sol’s attention and she glances behind her.
At the back of the living room next to an Mexican/Japanese ALTAR sits LUNA VASQUEZ, Mexican Indigenous woman, 40s, sitting in a chair, a BANDAGE on her temple.
In front of Luna is a small COFFEE TABLE and an EMPTY CHAIR the other side.
Luna turns OFF the alarm on her WATCH.
LUNA [to Sol] Do we have an appointment?
Sol turns away from the dress and walks to Luna.
SOL The Burkes people are coming.
Luna is unfamiliar with the words.
Sol walks over and tidies the living room.
LUNA Did you look at the quince invitation samples I picked up?
SOL I’ll look at them later.
LUNA I like the white ones, but I know black is your thing.
Sol does not respond.
LUNA (CONT’D) Can you imagine Tia Lulu’s face when she opens the envelope and it’s an all black invitation?
SOL We need to get through this exit interview. Can we just do that? Luna looks curiously, agreeably, at Sol.
LUNA Yes, we can do that, Mija.
The DOOR BELL RINGS.
We follow Sol to the front door.
2 INT/EXT. FRONT DOOR – DUSK 2 Through the frosted front door window, we see a silhouette.
Sol opens the door to reveal DEVROS, 30, an Indigenous woman in a BUSINESS SUIT. Devros carries a BRIEFCASE.
DEVROS Good afternoon.
Sol stares at Devros with daggers.
DEVROS (CONT’D) May I come in?
SOL We’re a no shoe household.
DEVROS What?
SOL Take your shoes off.
Devros nods.
Sol stands aside and Devros enters.
3 INT. LIVING ROOM – DUSK 3
Sol closes the door and Devros sees Luna.
DEVROS Hello [looks at phone to remember name] Luna.
Devros, who stands tall above Sol, takes off her power high heels, and is suddenly at eye level with Sol.
She puts her shoes near the dress studio threshold, the dress looms large behind her but she doesn’t see it.
Sol walks to the window near Luna as Devros sets her briefcase on the coffee table, and opens it to reveal DIALS, KNOBS, a MONITOR, and other tech.
DEVROS (CONT’D) It’s a bit muggy outside today ain’t it?
Devros walks to Luna, removes her bandage and sticks a SENSOR on Lunas temple.
DEVROS (CONT’D) Supposed to cool down by the end of the week though. Thank goodness.
Sol stares at Devros with fire in her eyes.
Devros sits back down and TURNS ON the machine.
DEVROS (CONT’D) Luna thank you for having me. I will be conducting your exit interview. To start, I am going to ask you a series of questions to help me establish a visual baseline.
Devros press a BUTTON.
DEVROS (CONT’D) Recording, Vasquez, Luna, August 21st, 6:15pm. [to Luna] Please state your name, age and where you were born.
LUNA Luna Vasquez, age 42. I was born in Mexico.
Devros looks at the small MONITOR built into the machine.
A fuzzy POV IMAGE appears on the monitor, LUNA’S MEMORIES.
ON THE MONITOR: A MAN leans over a PALETA VENDING CART. He hands a PALETA toward the screen. A small hand takes it.
DEVROS Luna, where were you living at age 7?
LUNA In Texas, at an immigrant detention center.
More memories appear…
ON THE MONITOR: A MAN IN UNIFORM carries away a beautiful INDIGENOUS WOMAN, Luna’s Mother. The pair of small brown hands reach out once more.
Sol stands near the window keeping an eye on Devros. Devros studies the image on the Monitor.
Devros sits in perfect posture and locks eyes with Luna.
DEVROS Very good. And at age 20?
LUNA I was in the Bay Area by then.
ON THE MONITOR: Adult brown hands wave out of a car window and catch the air as the city of San Francisco comes into focus.
DEVROS Okay, moving on. This next set of questions will determine if the the procedure was successful. [beat] Luna, where did you go to college?
Sol braces herself and looks at Luna.
Devros looks at the monitor.
The video monitor goes BLACK.
Luna searches the ceiling for an answer.
DEVROS (CONT’D) Did you go to college?
BEAT
LUNA No, I didn’t.
Tears and rage fill Sol’s eyes.
Devros pulls a ROTARY CUTTER from the briefcase.
DEVROS Please identify this object.
The video monitor stays black.
LUNA I don’t know. A pizza cutter?
Devros puts the cutter away.
DEVROS Are you married?
LUNA Widowed.
DEVROS What was your wife’s name?
LUNA My partner’s name was Miyoshi Watanabe.
ON THE MONITOR: MIYOSHI, non binary, Japanese, face resting on a pillow. Brown hands reach out and caress their cheek.
DEVROS Where did you first meet Miyoshi?
Sol looks to from Devros to Luna bracing for impact. Luna searches the ceiling for answers.
The image of Miyoshi DISSOLVES to black.
LUNA I don’t remember.
Luna glances quickly at Sol.
Sol walks to Luna, crouches down and holds Luna’s hand.
Devros sees this gesture, swallows and refocuses her attention to the interview.
DEVROS Who is professor Maria Pomo?
LUNA Who?
DEVROS How much is the annual tuition at the California Fashion Academy?
LUNA I don’t know.
Devros then checks the video monitor which remains blank.
Devros studies Luna’s face sharply to detect a lie, but meets Luna’s eyes.
Devros pulls out a DIGITAL TABLET with legalese on it. They read the words to Luna.
DEVROS Luna, we are here – you are here, because you defaulted on your student loans. In accordance with Federal penal code 71-489, Burkes Loan Corporation has the right to reclaim from you, our property. And in this matter, our property would be the education you received from The California Fashion Academy from the ages of 18 to 23. On June, 12th you agreed in a court of law to sign away the memory of this education in order to nullify your contractual obligation to Burkes.
Luna searches her mind hard. The memories flood back.
LUNA Yes. I remember now.
DEVROS Then I am certifying that all memories related to your time in college, skills learned therein, as well as all work, and career related memories stemming from said education you purchased on loan have been satisfactorily deleted.
Devros puts the TABLET down on the table. They place a STYLUS on the table for Ria to sign with.
DEVROS (CONT’D) Now, if you could just sign here, your contract with Burkes will be terminated and your educational debt will be absolved.
Sol pries Luna’s hand away from hers and puts a stylus in it. Luna signs the digital tablet.
DEVROS (CONT’D) Congratulations, Luna.
In the foreground, Devros packs the briefcase. In the background Luna sits silently as Sol holds her hand.
Devros gets up and turns to grab her shoes, this time she NOTICES the half-finished Quinceañera dress.
For the slightest moment, Devros BREAKS.
She pries her eyes away, puts on her shoes, turns to the front door and exits.
Sol stares up at Luna, Luna stares at the table.
LUNA College. [beat] Miyoshi and I must have met in college.
SOL Freshman year. [Beat] Mamá, you need to rest.
LUNA You’re right. I need some rest.
DISSOLVE TO:
4 INT. LUNA’S BEDROOM – NIGHT 4
Through a mirror on the wall, we watch Sol tuck Luna into bed and begin to walk out.
Sol stops at the doorway.
Luna begins to say something but stops.
Sol closes the door.
Off Luna.
5 INT. DRESSMAKING STUDIO – NIGHT 5
Sol stands at the threshold of the studio staring at her unfinished quince dress.
She works up the courage and STEPS softly into the room.
She turns on the CHRISTMAS LIGHTS which illuminate the dress and walls with a soft glow.
She walks around the room reminiscing and stops on an old FAMILY PHOTO of Miyoshi and Luna tacked to the wall.
Finally, she turns to the dress and stares it down.
SUDDENLY, she GRABS the dress and THROWS it on the ground.
She pounces on it and TEARS it apart.
When her rage subsides, she sits among shreds of fabric. Beat.
A soft KNOCK behind Sol on the studio door frame. Sol looks behind her and sees Luna at the threshold. Sol stares at her mother, horrified at what she’s done.
Luna walks over to Sol, standing tall over her, surveying the damage.
LUNA Looks like it was gonna be a pretty bad ass dress, huh? Did you help me make it?
SOL Yeah. You cut out all the pieces and I basted them together.
Luna kneels down next to Sol and looks in her eyes.
Luna picks up a scrap of fabric and a stray PIN on the ground and hands it to Sol.
LUNA Show me.
Sol takes the fabric and pin from Luna and remembers where it goes on the dress form.
She tries to pin the fabric in place, but has trouble managing the task with both hands full.
Sol hands Luna the piece of fabric.
SOL Can you hold this piece here so I can tack it easier?
Luna complies.
As Sol tacks the fabric in place, her eyes are locked in shame on the dress form.
SOL (CONT’D) I’m sorry.
Luna puts her finger under Sol’s chin and pulls her gaze into Luna’s eyes.
LUNA Baby, it’s not your fault. [beat] It’s not mine either. So many pendejos have tried to make us forget who we are. It never works.
Sol hugs Luna DEEPLY.
They pull apart and look at the work ahead of them.
LUNA (CONT’D) Listo?
Sol nods.
They begin piecing the dress back together, laughing and making small talk, as mother and daughter.
FADE TO BLACK.
Roberto Fatal [they/them/ellos] is a filmmaker and storyteller. They come from Rarámuri, Tewa Pueblo, Ute, and Spanish ancestors and Mexican-American culture. Their Queer, gender fluid, Mestize/Mixed identity informs the sci-fi, films they make. Their work centers on humans who sit at the intersections of time, space and culture. From this unique vantage point, these characters can bridge divides, see all sides, find new paths forward and recall multiple histories long forgotten. The mixed people of Fatal’s stories can connect us deeply to an undercurrent of humanity that we often overlook in a world that is increasingly divided. Survival, intersectional identity, perseverance, love, empathy, community, connection and creation are at the heart of their characters and films. Fatal is a Sundance Film Institute Native Film Lab Fellow Alum and an Imagine Native Director’s Lab feature film fellow alum. Their debut feature script, Electric Homies, was selected by GLAAD x The Black List as one of the best unproduced screenplays of 2022. Their latest short sci-fi drama, Do Digital Curanderas Use Eggs In Their Limpias, will make its world premiere in 2023.
Ali Meyers-Ohki (she/her) is an emerging writer based in Sacramento, California. Her connection to her mixed Japanese and European ancestry as well as her experiences as a cis queer woman inspire her to write stories about identity, belonging, family, healing, history, and the future. Her work has been published by Queer Rain Magazine and she is a 2022 recipient of the Hedgebrook residency. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Bennington for fiction writing.
“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” -bell hooks
What is the right shade of brown in America?
Western med school students have been and are currently still trained to diagnose skin conditions by studying photos of mostly white bodies. They admit that almost “…half of US board-licensed dermatologists don’t feel comfortable diagnosing skin issues in people of color” because they don’t know how to look at darker skin. What’s worse, the few black bodies photographed in textbooks show only sexually transmitted infections. The images are “reminiscent of slave auctions, looking at their muscles and reproductive potential, humiliating them.”¹
There’s an old-ass Flexner Report that led to this literal, racist whitewashing—by shutting down Black medical colleges and other med schools that taught Native American healing along with, “herbalism, homeopathy, and chiropractic,”² which were legit modalities at the turn of the 20th century.
And what if that shady brown girl’s skin is sick? What if she’s a walking band-aid, a perpetual affliction?
One in four Americans have skin diseases, costing $75 billion a year to treat. Throughout my decades of inherited dis-ease, I’ve invested in doctors after healers after elimination diets after practitioners after stress-eating all the potato chips after therapists for help, to cure the seemingly incurable skin.
An acceptable shade of brown. Is there such a thing?
For fellow brown n’ broken skin kin, here’s a list of what I’d want for us, an ideal dermatology visit. Lemme know what you’d add because I want this to be a radically collaborative exercise:
❑First of all, the reason you made an appointment is because on their website is the clinic’s Skins of Color Acknowledgement. They promptly recognize and commit to reparations from Western medicine’s racist, whitewashed historical and present practices. (You may arrive at the office a little SUS–as the kids say–and that’s okay. Our bodies are good at guarding us. Can you gulp water and exhale as you walk in? Text me; if you want, I can meet you there.)
❑The receptionist maintains eye contact, warm, genuine. They don’t wide-eye, gaze down or stare sideways at our skin.
❑They thoughtfully considered our skin history before we arrived. They offer us a prepared soothing drink made from safe-for-us plant medicines. For me, it’s coconut water, tamarind juice, bayabas (guava) leaf tea.
❑We are shown a buffet of lotions and ointments, and we are trusted to choose the exact ones that work (for now—this is a rotating sitch based on weather, allergens, triggers).
❑Our treatment room is set to the climate best for our skin needs. For me, tropical climate: humid air, thickly fragrant with sweet banana leaves and Philippine jasmine, the sampaguita flower. (Big, frizzy hair is a default here!)
❑Instead of abstract art on the walls, there are photos of all ages and skin conditions reflecting us: rashy, brown, gap-toothed, freckled, peeling, black, wrinkled, rosy, plaqued, scarred, beloved.
❑With consent, we are touched gently “where it hurts,” not man-handled like a specimen or a thing with cooties. Here, they, “move at the speed of trust.” Whenever we want, and for as long as it feels good, we are hugged.
❑We rest on a warm amethyst bed, and acupuncture needles are applied to move, to release stuck or unstimulated chi—some ancestral energies waiting to be unblocked. If we need the sun’s healing (without the damaging UV) we glow underneath light therapy panels while our weary chi flickers, flutters and flows.
❑Upon our request, at any time, we can listen to audio of prose potions (e.g. Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.)
❑If further narrative medicine is needed, the doctor meets us outside where we prefer (beach, park, our neighborhood) for a long walk to hear more of our story. They witness our wonderings about why our skin is inflamed and erupting. They say, I’m sorry you’re hurting. They ask often, too, What delights you? They teach their staff to do the same, to say, Tell me more.
❑This could be when the doctor shares stories of their own family’s experiences with skin dis-eases. It’s precisely because their own flesh and blood suffer that they chose to become a dermatologist.
❑We make art, like kids who parallel play, as we ruminate and celebrate the latest therapies and treatments in communities around the planet. (A favorite: cutting and gluing collage³ visions.)
❑The more we come for treatment and care, we realize others are hanging out in this Third Space. They choose to be here. We get it; we get each other—breached skin and all. It’s deep listening without “advice” and “should-ing” on ourselves. It’s hell yeah when one has a good night’s sleep or is in remission. As regular practice, we tend to our griefs. Heart medicine.
❑For those curious and open to a little spirit-trippin’, we recline in a bed lined with fresh aloe. Indigenous healers circle us, massage coconut oil into open wounds and sing over us. We are bathed in ancestral tongues. Their voices ribbon throughout the center, weaving everyone together in song.
❑After each visit, on our way out, we are given baskets to fill with orange food our bodies can enjoy. Real orange food (not Cheetos orange) offer skin-supporting nutrients. The staff and allies grow, prepare, and bring carrots, pumpkin muffins, sweet potato chips, roasted butternut squash, dried apricots, mango smoothies, wild yam soup.
❑There are more lotion and ointment travel sizes to take, to dole out. Lotion as love language. A sign invites, “Grab and give to other skin kin!”
❑The one thing that does not fill our hands, pockets, and baskets? A bill or co-pay.
❑When we’re ready for our next appointment, the day and time we prefer is open and waiting.
Yes, I know, this sounds BOTH so reasonable and yet, as our experiences with the medical system remind us, too good to be true. I promise, it’s possible. I’ve experienced many of these treatments. Join your dreams to ours, so we can dream the rest into life.
May we read these out loud, first to ourselves, then around a table or fire. May we yell them into the ocean, bury, drown, spit and scratch, dig ‘em up.
May we print this out to bring to our next appointment.
May we offer to the doctor, nurse, receptionist, therapists and techs. Our neighbors and frenemies, too. Like a birthing plan that includes the whole community.
May we raise our hands and say, This is what we want and need. We’ve been waiting our whole lives for this. Believe us. We are laboring together, our
earth-cracked
skins en-flamed,
dancing and dripping.
¹ From Inflamed: Deep medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. ² ibid. ³ Collage is traced to China in 200 BC… “today, art involving pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface.”
Ephemera, “lasting only a short while.” See, “life.” Supporting surface, see: Collective Care
Ella deCastro Baron is a second generation Filipina American teacher and storyteller, a VONA alum, and cohort leader of Corporeal Writing’s 2024 Mushroom School. Ella’s first book, Itchy Brown Girl Seeks Employment, is an ironic curriculum vitae of her ethnic upbringing, inherited faith, and chronic illness. Her forthcoming book, Subo and Baon: a Memoir in Bites, is a ‘meal’ that offers nourishment while decolonizing harmful systems, so we can “re-member our long body,” recover fuller stories and indigenous ways. Ella cultivates kapwa (Filipino value of deep interconnection, shared identity) in communities near and far. Her favorite pronoun is We. elladecastrobaron.com.
On this morning, we unfold in our bedroom. All that is ours begins to reach for who we water. Two palms stretch from our satin sheet towards our sky and neither of them are yours. A sun salutation, or a mirror for how we give, when listening. I wait under the sun until you wake to touch you. Your heartbeat begins and ends and begins and how beautiful a drum to remind our hands, our bodies, that we are alive. Your hand reaches for where you left our music dreaming and your fingers string until you find a drum, until you find the soil we nourish, until your pulse begins across my thigh, crawling while asleep. I witness your dreaming while awake. We unfold under a sky that is a heaven in my first tongue. We create heaven in both. Across our waters, our islands, this heaven made here. Mi cielo, we are alive
mi cielo, we are alive
still
Gisselle Yepes received their MFA in creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington and their BA from Wesleyan University. Yepes is a Letras Boricuas 2022 Fellowship Recipient, a Tin House Scholar, and a 2023 Sundress Academy of the Arts Resident. Their poetry has been featured in Moma Magazine, Gulf Coast, Poets.org and the anthology Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions of Healing and Justice. Yepes’ creative nonfiction essay “On Her Waters Summoning Us to Drown” won december magazine’s 2022 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Creative Nonfiction, and their film Recordando a Wela was featured on GIPHY.
One thought circled Phi’s mind like a ravenous hawk. She was the last mermaid on earth. She couldn’t recall the last time she spied glimmerwings. That’s what Bà called each shimmering scale that appeared on her tail when she came of age. Perhaps they were hiding under long gauzy layers of fabric that shushed as those foreigners trudged by.
In the earliest days of After, her glimmerwings would draw strangers’ gawks and wide maws. Now there were too few left to be finger pointed. Each time she lost another one she cried, even though, to her disbelief, she could walk with newfound strength. Her lungs swelled. She couldn’t stop herself from sob gasping, each breath harder to swallow than the last. Tears were the closest reminder of her birthplace and memories of her salty-eyed kin. Each one, a ballad stitched underneath her skin.
Phi clutched a necklace her great-grandmother, her namesake, gave her as a child. She inched an unforgiving chair towards a rusted patio table at an erstwhile diner called Jo’s. Its dented sign sat atop heap of shingles, the letter J a lopsided grin.
Another scorcher. Her tears dripped into an empty mug like a soft rain. Tip-tap, tip-tap. Her morning ritual. A whispered prayer of home.
*
Phi’s sisters were her world. In the cerulean depths of the ocean, they giggled and quibbled together. She was the youngest of five, the baby of the family. They chased eels and errant rowboats in the kelp forest, tickling each other with long tubular strands. They collected oyster shells, wrote love ballads and performed riotous musicals. Her favorite game was tail tag, where she had to swim backwards to avoid getting ousted. Time stretched with a lazy eye towards the sky.
One day near the summer solstice, the sun was hidden by clouds and her sisters swam out fast ahead of her. She lost sight of them. The waves grew dark and cold. A bitter pit swelled in her abdomen. Their absence, a void. Racing with alarm, she swam home—straight into Bà’s arms.
They didn’t wait for me, she cried. Her great grandmother, whose long black hair flowed past her arms, had a gift. She was a charmer; she could see the future. Bà gave her a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a winged tail, glinting rainbows in an arc of sunbeams.
Wah! Wipe away your tears, child, she said. Your name means flying, Phi. Look, she poked her. These wings mean you are destined to fly far from here. And one day you will be the one they follow.
Phi looked toward the churn of agitated clouds. She could see frantic fish and kelp forests and wild creatures somersaulting in a silver tsunami cloud. She blinked and looked at Bà. Were her great-grandmother’s eyes watering?
Something is coming, she said. I feel a thundering herd in my glimmerwings.
*
Mermaids had tried to warn humans. Phi’s sisters spelled out signs on seashells, sand dunes, even trash bins: Stop trampling our earth, polluting our air, ravaging our homeland, stop poisoning our seas, you foolish dumbbells. Stupid, stupid illiterate beasts. But no amount of prodding, insults or threats would stall mouth breathers and their goddam greed.
One day the earth mother opened her giant maw and swallowed the fancy cities and the mountain towns and the people who inhabited them. Gulp after gulp after gulp.
Until it was all gone.
Phi lost sight of her sisters near their hideout and woke up days later with her tail shriveled on an abandoned shore. Everything was unfamiliar. Metallic sand dotted with chipped bones. Her head erupted with grief.
Her ocean had vanished. Half the population wiped out. Only mud and metal survived. She could still hear echoes of her sisters’ screams. Terror ricocheted her chest. She saw limbs and flailing tails in the inky darkness of her nightmares.
*
Why was Phi the only one of her kind saved? This question haunted her, clanging in her eardrums. Her tail dissolved. She scoured abandoned cities and barely recognizable towns. Only overturned cars and ransacked barns. She wandered through tent villages at the edges of once great tree forests and traveled as far as the desert. No one spoke her tongue. No one was left to wipe away her tears. This abandoned diner had become as familiar as the kelp forest once was. Loneliness, her sole companion.
*
A hundred mornings later a woman in a cornflower blue dress waved her arms wildly at her. Phi froze, stunned by her sudden appearance.
I’ve been searching for you, she said. My name is Jo. This was my diner. Before, you know, everything. She paused to catch her breath.
Me? You can understand me? Phi squinted to take in her eyes. She saw a hint of blue, something familiar like the ocean. She was reminded of her sisters, once so full of life.
Yes, you’re most definitely her. My mother gave me a painting when I was a girl. The most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Every silverfish, every starling, every human circled you in prayer. I thought you were imagined until today.
This human, who reminded Phi of all that she had lost, stretched out a hand towards Phi. Her palm, a soft opening, an invitation.
A warm kindling awoke in Phi’s belly. A familiar scent of home saturated her lungs. The vanilla musk of star-shaped gardenia blossoms infused with brine and hope. She understood that their fates were intertwined.
Her Bà’s voice returned. You will be the one they follow.
*
A pair walked hand in hand north following a trail of milky white petals. Overhead a red-tailed hawk hailed her mate. Cak-cak, cak-cak. Phi wiped the last of her tears with her skirt. Her eyes glimmered a deep phosphorescent blue, the same shade as the flying, flying sea.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Jen Soong grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in Northern California. An alum of Tin House and VONA, her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Audacity, Black Warrior Review, Witness, and Waxwing. She earned her MFA in creative writing from UC Davis. Her memoir-in-progress a reckoning of myth and migration. Find her work at jensoong.com. Photo by Haley James.
with a line by Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison
We all pass through death to come into life, though some of us merely pass.
She lost a baby before me. Also a sister. Imagine.
Hearing this story is like breathing air that has not been breathed for forty years. Afterward I go home. I light so many candles.
When I was born, she counted my fingers and toes, then she wept to see me alive. She looked down at me, cradled in her arms, and I was beautiful.
She says it’s the light she remembers. The slow, wonder-filled hours.
After giving birth, I woke every night soaked in milk—the front of my nightgown, the sheets; damp stains on cotton. A shape that spreads.
The shape of her story, which I lived in but had no words for, though I wore it like a second skin.
We who begin in this way, surely we can taste it. The tang of melancholy, seeping through amniotic fluid.
Her body, bent over the sewing machine. And me, stirring inside. Stitched from bone, from the pound and yammer of machinery.
The needle’s noisy whir, presser foot against throat. Ravenous, eating down the miles of grief.
Difficult beauty, they say, takes time. What happens next is never ours to say.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2025); Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, and a Maine Literary Award; and the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year. She teaches creative writing at Left Margin LIT and is a proud Kundiman Fellow, as well as a founding member of The Ruby, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. Read more at miamalhotra.com.
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