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.
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.
In 1921, Warren G. Harding was sworn in as the 29th President of the United States. Calvin Coolidge (a future president himself) was sworn in as his Vice President. On Campobello Island, another future present, Franklin D. Roosevelt was on vacation when his paralytic illness struck; he was diagnosed with polio and at age 39 became permanently disabled.
My dad was an attorney, and I remember him saying to me, “Never write anything down you don’t want someone else to read.” From the perspective of an attorney, I understand that. And there was the revolutionary in me, and I decided I am going to write down all my secret interior life. So maybe poetry started there. . .
The neighbor had a few trees removed, and they had to leave the trunks out on the lawn overnight. The sun went down, or the truck was full, or else I guess they maybe just needed a break. They were ash trees, I think. . .
I knew I wanted to write about the Korean War, which is why I started in 1951, but I was mostly interested in the aftermath. When we think about how we learned about war in our history textbooks, it’s always delineated as a discrete period of time. The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953, but the effects on the people took time to manifest, especially when we’re thinking about intergenerational trauma. . .
On the day that Christine Blasey Ford testified about being assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, we found Newton, our nineteen-year-old cat, cowering behind the toilet. Each time we reached for him, he recoiled.
My husband adopted Newton before he and I met. . .
Year: 2009
Digital photograph printed with mineral pigment on cotton paper.
Format: 60cm x 90cm
Location: Minas Gerais, Brazil
I am drawn to a series of black and white photos in a recent New Yorker magazine. The article reviews a book of 1200 images through which the author, Nancy Floyd, chronicles herself aging over a forty year period. Flabbergasted, I stare at the ease with which she leans against doorways or fence posts, without any of the vanity or careful posing that has been typical of most of my lifelong behavior when being photographed. . .
My novel is about an eighteen-year-old girl, or woman depending on your nomenclature, who, in a summer, has two emotionally complicated sexual relationships with men she hasn’t known very long. I wanted to write an adventure story like the adventures young men get to have all the time. . .
Those odd phases and periods, the stolen moments in-between, there is always this strange infolding of vacuity, a mental collapse of sorts. Uncanny, even mystical to say the least. . .
I awake to the shrill of chickens, nature’s alarm clock. My two sisters, with whom I’m sharing a bedroom and two bare mattresses, retreat under their blankets like hermit crabs to their shells. Avoiding the hazy dawn that spills out of the window and into the room. . .
The first time it really hit her, Rosa was in her teens.
The children were spending their summer vacation at the sprawling García ranch at the foot of the sierras, and on a particularly hot afternoon, she had gone bareback riding with Soledad, while the rest of the kids stayed behind playing children’s games. Daring each other, they ran the horses hard and far from the house. . .
Look at this, a hand towel, hot from the dryer. A souvenir from a friend’s trip to Italy not so long ago. I bury my face in its warmth, unable to let go until the linen is cold. It clearly speaks for itself, but when I point that out, no one listens so I must make the case myself. . .
Faces fixed in separate
boxes, lips stiff,
eyes flat with fatigue,
I am so often smiling.
Ollie is pulling his eighteen-month-old sister’s hands. “Come on, Mae. I wanna show you. Come with me, Mae. Come with me.” She is pulling away from him. He is too strong. Keeps pulling. Mae begins to wail. . .
My current research and work involves explorations in visual art and creative writing largely concerned with investments that transform geographic spaces into personal places. This includes, for example, unfamiliar space becoming intimate or familiar; single locations endowed with multiple meanings by different people or communities; or the way place is bestowed with power and presence. . .
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. . .
Noah reads the headline from today’s Baltimore Sun: “Get Ready For Brood X: The Once-Every-17-Year Cicada Swarm Is Coming.” The last time Noah heard the chirping of Brood X, a petite girl in a blue nightie slowly opened the door, from inside her hotel room. She had small hips and a baby’s face, looking nowhere near the twenty-one years old her ad claimed her to be . . .
I don’t prefer one over the other. They are quite different in the fact that they allow for different types of information to be imagined and communicated. They are the same in the sense that both of them have a wide variety of modes attached to them. You don’t write just one poem. You can learn to write an elegy, an ode, a sonnet. . .
I do really identify with being a poet, obviously. And I definitely don’t identify as an academic. I don’t know if I’ll ever identify as an academic. But right now I’m working on fiction, actually. I’m interested in disrupting these boxes that we’re asked to put ourselves in–or not boxes, but categories. . .
A lot of black people live [here]
And they – got big houses
And the houses all look kind of
the same
After high school, Laura, Camille, Jeanette, and I got twenty-hour-a-week jobs at the Avalon Mall and devised elaborate plots to maintain long-distance relationships with our boyfriends. Gracie announced that she’d bought a ticket to Saigon. . .
We blinked.[…]
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. . .
Ida
Pierced the light
The air thick as fog
The black mirror full of moss
Is shatter-scattered now
We forgot the umbrella just outside the front door. It was a practicality as it dried, but I found it poetic and left it there which was not very practical at all. Except for the spider, who deemed it a buttress for the curved extrados of his home He rests saintly still upon his lattice cathedral, so still that I assume him dead until I accidentally shatter the intricate webbing with my hips. . .
There’s a girl on the rooftop. I’ve never been up here with someone else before. To be honest, I didn’t think anyone else knew how to clamber to the top of James Madison Memorial High School other than the jocks who drunkenly dare each other to do it at post-game parties. But this girl isn’t a jock. . .
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
About a year after Mom died, when I was a freshman in high school, I had a weekend job as a cashier at a car wash. Customers pulled their Range Rovers and Subarus up to my window and ordered the type of wash they wanted from a menu, kind of like McDonald’s, except this historical town’s zoning laws prohibited most chain restaurants and franchises. . .
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. . .
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