On that lawn each morning a little girl’s sandal rests in the grass. Today the flip-flop for weeks became a pink gellie, the color of my skin disease, but lighter. The white truck gassing mosquitoes just whined by in the dark, convincing no one. I wonder, as if to say goodbye, if the driver has a newspaper on his bench seat. I just got bit. After Labor Day, the ice cream van that played the theme from“The Sting” and Bach fugues stopped making its crawling rounds. I just now noticed it gone. Soon it will be summer again, I believe for a moment. Vampires are cool. That’s why they are so cool. I could explain everything, will be my last joke. My arrangements are not up to date. I prefer Basie’s. The rumor around the mill village is that a nuclear scientist haunts my house. I have denied nothing. I like to look at salt even more than I like to use it, it is so clean and chaste, making the heavy water lighter, lighter than the sea that drained from his scalpeled cheek in the midst. That shoe, later it got rained on, almost sweetly, but too late.
Further Reading
Tana by Irene Jiménez (translated from Spanish by Catherine Nelson)
“I’ve been so committed to the fight for the homosexual cause,” Benjamin explained introspectively, “that I forgot to love.” Ursula, Tana, and Miguel sipped the soup in their spoons and then returned the utensils to their bowls. They looked at Benjamin with understanding smiles. No one had commented on the fact that he had come […]
An excerpt from the novel SEASON OF ASH by Jorge Volpi (translated by Alfred MacAdam)
Enough rot, howled Anatoly Diatlov. The alarm went off at 1:29 a.m. Moving at 300,000 kilometers a second, the photons passed through the screen—rendered brick-colored by the dust—pierced the air saturated with smoke from Turkish cigarettes, and, following a straight line through the control room, smashed into his pupils just before the blare of a […]
Review of Liminal and Nadir by Laura Fusco
translated from the Italian by Caroline Maldonado
reviewed by Jacqueline Schaalje
Liminal and Nadir, two poetry books by Laura Fusco, present the voices of refugees in as direct a way as possible so we can feel and recognize their experiences.
