Winter Spring 2023 Issue 22
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.
Kara is 14 and over breakfast, Cousin Martha comes up, how she got herself in trouble running around with boys.
“No one’s going to buy the cow if you’re giving the milk away for free,” Kara’s dad tells her, not for the first time, or last.
Kara opens her mouth wide, chewing loudly. She moos in a spot-on cow impression.
When my toddler son says the word “mum,” it is not me he looks at. While his voice enunciates the first letter with a clipped edge, he points instead at a trumpet-shaped hibiscus we always pluck from the flower tree tipping across the fence delineating his older brother’s school. It feels magnificent that he says this word, but it is also shocking that he cannot fit me into it.
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.
Despite his popularity in Brazil and his immigration to Europe, Murilo Mendes has never found an English translator.
In the introduction, I was framing the book. Why this book? Why me? Why now? What will you get from reading this book? A kind of a preview. So, in writing all of this, I used the phrase craft and conscience to address the importance of that duality. Craft includes conscience. Discussions of craft must include issues of conscience, because issues of conscience are not separate.
Monk poet Guan-xiu (832-912) was a renowned Chan (Zen) Buddhist hermit, wanderer, and artists of many disciplines at a turmoil time of Medieval China. Like many Chan monks before him, he embodied poetry in his religious meditation and vice versa.
“Spatial Empathy” describes the awareness of an individual to the proximity, activities, and comfort of people surrounding them. It is related to the notion of personal space, the concept that an individual has ownership of their immediate surroundings; and for others to invade this space represents an infringement on their privacy.
thought my glass smelled like puke
or maybe the whole bar or maybe
the guy leaning over me no he
smelled like cologne smelled like
this other time at a bar smelled
It was a combination of literary and non-literary influences. I work for Environmental Defense Fund. I have done a lot of work around what it means to engage both with colleagues at the organization and with communities who are experiencing the impacts of the Anthropocene immediately and directly. That’s really shifted how I think about my work as a writer.
Now, I will thread my arms through my raincoat and pull on my galoshes. Heave the rucksack onto my back. There is little I’ll miss in this house I’ve been scrubbing for forty years. I’ll hitchhike into the city. Tighten the straps and follow the crow swooping east, head toward the scent of death and rebirth—of decaying leaves composting into moist earth—
You might think words live in your mouth. But you would be wrong. Your lips, your tongue, your cheeks, your teeth are just a vessel language moves through. The headwaters of language rest deep inside your brain where image, sound, and memory curl into meaning, flow into words, and cascade into sentences. It can dry up or slow to a trickle.
i hope it follows you, circling like a bird of prey. i hope it sticks to your shoe like dog shit. i’m not doing well, and i think you should know. i hope this email slithers over the tile on your kitchen floor and sinks its teeth into your ankle.
One of the things I deliberately left out when I wrote about the island in the book was its size, because in real life it’s like three by two miles. It’s not very big. I wanted to be able to not pin myself down to a specific size because I plan to set more work there.
I stole the title for this body of work from my three-year-old niece. She was initially afraid of the shadows created by the canopy her mom placed over her bed. My sister-in-law was about to take it down when she said, “never mind, shadows love me!” These neon gel pen drawings were first exhibited in Portland, Oregon, at a café called Albina Press, in the Fall of 2022
As a poet, appropriation and collage have always been my primary mode. Distilling and transforming text. Layering and arranging text. My poetic interests have also leaned towards the visual arts: typography, page-space, dirty minimalism.
These junkmail collages were intended as a daily practice. Use only what falls through the mail slot. Be attentive to the rips and stains and bruises the paper incurred in its travels.
1. Do you agree that the Second Amendment guarantees your individual right to own a firearm?
Yes, but—
2. Do you support the confirmation of pro-Second Amendment judges to the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts?
No, the second amendment didn’t account for three round bursts.
As much as anything, I think that what has guided and sustained my work as a photographer is curiosity, the desire to see what something looks like as a photograph. I’ve always been fascinated by the “what it is, what it isn’t” factor of photography—how the literal can become figurative by changing the angle of view, the distance from the subject, or the light.
I pull my curtains open, lean on the sill,
sweating. Headlights bob uphill toward me.
Randy’s car, rattling tin an hour late,
swerves to park across the road: flicker
through the windshield, thumps of rock radio.
The beach is cold. Sierra’s never been on a beach that’s cold before. Back in Malibu, the only type of weather was beach weather: balmy skies, just enough salt on the breeze, and sunshine that kept her naturally pale skin tan year-round. This beach is most definitely not Malibu. Scruffy pines line the crumbling cliff faces, and everywhere she looks is gray: gray sand, gray sky, gray sea.
Some time, before we noticed it, Ah Ma had started renovating our cramped one-bedroom apartment into rows of cardboard boxes, boxes she got from buying canned beans, jars of spicy bamboo shoots, packs of Long Life noodles, because Ah Ma never buys just one thing at a time, that’s cheap and lonely, and we’re neither, instead, she buys things in double at least…
We packed an ice chest and drove from civilization to a grave. We drove forty-five minutes to a sea in the middle of the desert. You said the Salton Sea was a mistake—an engineering failure that caused the Colorado River to flood the Imperial Valley in 1905. But the mistake seemed a blessing in disguise.
When it was summertime and there was no school, Edmar’s cousin, Roanna, and her cat came from the Philippines to visit like they always did but, this time, to get married to his neighbor. Edmar, however, found this strange, as his cousin loved cats and his neighbor, Jeff, did not. “So what,” his father said at breakfast, swallowing his blood pressure medicine with his coffee…
I enter the Gaza Strip weekly, my routine the same: cross the border, get settled into my office, and then walk around the corner to purchase fruit and vegetables for the week from Abu Emad‘s market. In my 5 years in Palestine, I have become a regular at this market.
My boyfriend’s reasons for bringing home the fax machine were unclear. The insurance office where he worked was a curiosity of anachronism; Sergei and his colleagues wore wide collared shirts and polyester pants and saved their work on floppy disks. Their office was located in a former Masonic temple, and everything above the second floor was condemned. I was convinced it was a front for criminal activity.
I started work on the “Gloomy Blooms” photo series in May 2020. The country had gone into Covid lockdown in March, and like many people, I was struggling to adapt to my new, more isolated life. I’m an introvert, and alone time is very important to me, but even introverts have our limits. The lockdown made me realize how much I depend on seeing my friends and family.
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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courtesy of MAMM (Museu de Arte Murilo Mendes)