I like to know what to anticipate
little tacks . . . thinking about
what I didn’t know I
needed to worry about
I didn’t know you then. . .
Universo 127 was originally published in 2019 by Yerba Mala Cartonera in Bolivia, and it won Lucía Carvalho the Pablo Neruda prize for young Bolivian poets that same year.
At the entrance, a cluster of burly plants swayed in the wind. Tiny white flowers have sprung up on a pile of dead stems, and it all hums together, collapsing in on itself. Here––I’ll see it later on myself––you love plants, especially rotting or withering ones. . .
The sparse nature of Mécs’s work might make a translation superficially easier, but in reality it adds a great deal of depth and challenge—just what a translator is looking for! Her short, clipped sentences, are sometimes presented without much context, or are strung to together in one long, run-on sentence, where the scenes flicker by like pages in a flipbook.
it was a morning i will never forget, the morning i opened the door to the sound of them shouting,
let us march forward,
they always began with the same line,
the social scientists said of the onslaught of the sightless humans
Moga woke with a heavy head, her eyes full of sleep and sari damp with sweat. Immediately she felt a strong urge to lie back next to her son on the mat and enjoy the drowsiness of that hot morning.But the thought of the cashews, which had gone unpicked for two days, made her spring to her feet. . .
Our new target was local. Considering he was responsible for dispatching close to a dozen of us, motivation was not in short supply. Nor wrath and fury, though we tried to keep our emotions in check, focusing instead on our endgame: we had to avoid scaring Sgt. Robert Ray to death. . .
I have in mind a kind of time
That can’t be measured by clock
Or monitored by calendar;
Time that isn’t tucked away
In packages of seconds, days or centuries,
It’s a Saturday night in 2010 and I’m sandwiched between two fellow “nerds” on an overstuffed couch at a friend’s house. Their mom is making a family sized pan of nachos in the kitchen, while they queue up Doctor Who on the TV. I’m fifteen, bad at math, overexcited by new interests, and louder than I mean to be. . .
on the evening, later,
at the second we realize the sun still falls.
At the mercy of the name
we will give it when language
turns brittle to touch. Later,
Earlier this year, I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. If you haven’t read this book yet, be advised, there are spoilers ahead. It took me two whole weeks to read this novel, nearly 800 pages of torture for the reader. Yanagihara’s story follows Jude, a character who, according to an interview, is someone who simply “never gets better”
It suddenly comes back to you late one night as you struggle with a story about a haunted house. You’re writing in that way where you’re fixated on the next line, but nothing feels right, because deep down you’re expecting that next line to fix everything that’s wrong. You’re in your apartment bedroom, lit by your laptop…
Don’t let go
Those words.
Let go of what?
I cast her a look.
Her feet
The other day, I watched L.A. Story (1991) with Steve Martin for the first time since I was a child. It’s a story about Harris K. Telemacher – a wacky television meteorologist by day, an intellectual with a PhD in Arts and Humanities by night. Harris lives in Los Angeles, a city known for valuing wealth and appearance over knowledge and character…
The minute the bullet pierced his face
the sky so moon-flooded collapsed into a rhapsody
and the city swales swelled with lilac wildflowers—
it was a winter of untameable fire
and bitter nostalgia, brother. . .
As of this hour, the sun has been up some time and is bright as August begins
and an invisible hand moves among leaves, tickles them in their deeply green
luster. I’m thinking of you, the look in your eyes—weary. I want to fill this house . . .
Thalassa was born at sea, on the waves of a storm. Because of this, she loved the ocean. Sometimes, it felt as though her veins were full of seawater instead of blood. […]
Between June and July, you lost twenty pounds. And maybe he died because of it. Wait. Was it fifteen pounds? Eighteen? You can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter—Maybe he died because of it…
Gonzalo de la Peña, a forty-year-old schoolteacher from our village, kept crickets in little bamboo cages that he purchased from a roving vendor while visiting the Capitol. He kept the crickets as a hobby, though he had little time for anything but teaching (he was very conscientious) and running an orange juice stand at the market, a tiring job he performed day after day to earn extra money for his family and tedious in-laws [. . .]
I walk the cradle to the grave.
The bassinet soaks my hair like hot foam
Like a drowning dance, my toes are pointed in my shoes. [. . .]
You are digging a hole. You’re not sure why, but it suits you. It makes it easier that you like the people you do it with. Not that there’s ever more than one person to a hole—a hole is a completely solitary thing—but the ones digging nearby, you think they make good conversation. […]
With fanatical determination, I memorized the required lines to affirm I took Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, all the while thinking to myself, “I absolutely believe no such crazy thing.” After my baptism on that hot summer day, I finally felt like a proper member of my southern family, and not just the cousin from California-where-all-the-weirdos-lived. I was euphoric, enjoying Jell-O salad and sweet tea with my kin. But when I returned to California, Christian hymns and sweet baby Jesus were put away and forgotten.
Do not go to a birthday party the night your grandmother dies. Do not pick up a six-pack of White Claws (black cherry) on the way and then drink four of them while you look into your partner’s eyes defiantly, a challenge. Do not ask him if he will stop you, if he will nudge you toward considering the line between grief and excess [. . .]
I hit a writing wall. I could construct a narrative and cast characters, but I didn’t enjoy the sentences I wrote. I didn’t know if they communicated what I thought they did. I could write one I liked every now and then, but I want to write well on purpose, not by accident.[…]
The first time my classically trained ears hear “Forty Six & 2” by the legendary metal band Tool, I was washing dishes alone in my apartment, music blasting through my Bose headphones. I had heard of Tool before, of course, but in high school my best friend wouldn’t stop talking about them, but, like everything else that was overtalked, I ignored them. I wasn’t really into heavy metal at the time either. I didn’t find much of what I was looking for in heavy metal, but I opened my Spotify app and search for Tool. What I really wanted to do was focus, and the way that I focused best was through classical music…
I’m crying in the principal’s office, but I’m an adult. I’ve just quit my job at the school where I started my teaching career, and I’m telling my boss why. No, I don’t have a job lined up. No, it’s not because of any negative experience: I love this campus and the community I’ve made here since 2013. I just… need to go.
We call him Hugo Apollo
a science fictional name
perfect for the first space
he inhabits after birth, [. . .]
Hearing someone else’s perspective inspired me. That’s what I’d forgotten. It was 2016. I’d lived in New York City for almost four years. I was still working on a YA manuscript that I started writing four years ago during NaNoWriMo. I’d had one short story published in a magazine, but that was a while back. I had a new desk job in the city where I tried to dodge invitations to go to Chop’t on my lunch break so I could write. I had a writing partner who lived in Albuquerque, and we were working on TV scripts together. Our G-chats about story ideas were fun, full of energy, and always gave me ten new ideas for our script. But novel writing remained a long and lonely process…
My old creative writing teacher leans his squat body against his desk, his girthy thighs splayed across the seat of his swivel chair. I’m sitting beside him in one of those plastic stand-alone chairs with metal legs that are inherent to schools, and I’m sporting tight clothes that don’t technically break the standardized dress code, though some teachers in the halls give me looks. The way we’re sitting, mere inches from one another, close enough to touch, feels uncomfortably familiar, but I push the thought from my mind.
The earth has washed its lovely hands of us. Enough!
so sayeth the world. Knock it off. Sit still and think
hard about all that you have done. […]
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Lizabeth Berkeley