By BEN TAMBURRI
Photo courtesy of author
Baileys Harbor, WI
Baileys Harbor has always felt like a place that is eternally old, eternally in the past. It is a destination for quiet summers on the Wisconsin peninsula, where the insignia of range lights and lighthouses decorate the bathroom of every home, and Dala horses wreath the doors. It was the place of my youth, even if it was only for a week each year. As a kid, when my family visited, I felt at home among the retired condo-dwellers.
Photo courtesy of author
Herod, Illinois
There are two Gardens of the Gods, but the one in Southern Illinois fit our budget. On the drive down from Iowa City, we listen to podcasts about Norse and Greek mythology to fill the twins’ heads with ideas of magic, with the hope that they might complain less about the hiking. From their car seats, they point out farms with broken corn stalks and a Burger King, making the argument that we must still be in Iowa. Even though we’ve traveled six hours, their six-year-old brains haven’t yet connected time and distance. But I’ve been in the Midwest long enough to know the difference between the farms around a college town and farms around a farming town. And if I wasn’t wisened to it, the signage would teach me soon enough. Traveling through rest stops and restaurants puts us on edge. We make the outline of an average family with a couple of feral kids, if people don’t linger too long in their gaze.
By AYA LABANIEH
Anaheim, California, dreaming of Damascus, Syria — a place I have not been able to visit since the war began in 2011.
I had a dizzying dream last night. I picked up the phone, and called my grandma—my mom’s mom, the woman who raised me. She was laughing—I told her something about what I had been going through, I don’t remember what. I was being candid in a way that would be unthinkable in the real world; maybe I even told her about the ugly breakup with R. The warm acceptance on the other line astounded me. “Why don’t I call you more often?” I asked her.
“Wallah tayteh, I miss you, you should tell me everything.”
Photo courtesy of the author.
Shrewsbury, MA.
There’s a family seated at a window booth across the aisle from us; the youngest daughter keeps attempting to pronounce “syrup.” I wonder what she’ll remember of this breakfast in five years’ time. Maybe today she reminds you of me.
My earliest memories of an IHOP are sticky: the yellow walls seeping into the faux-leather booth seats; a stain on the carpet. All this beneath a crumpled-looking roof in a parking lot below the I-90 on the outskirts of Boston. Still, I could order as many blueberry-chocolate chip pancakes topped with creamy-fruity smiley faces as I wanted. The point wasn’t that I particularly liked eating the smiley faces, but that there simply were and could be smiley faces. And, in the meantime, before my hot cocoa (also with whipped cream) arrived, a crate of Smucker’s jam packets to stack and suck on awaited on the tabletop. This Ur-IHOP was sweeter than home, overtly abundant, happy, and these qualifiers felt, at the time, somehow synonymous. At home, mornings typically consisted of milky buckwheat porridge and cheese curds. Here, breakfast came with a set of primary-colored crayons.
New Madrid, Missouri
I. Mississippi River, Dec. 16, 1811
After midnight, cottonwoods are inconsequential teeth, ripped from the ground by the Mississippi River. An elm snaps like a bird’s neck: an egret. The current betrays every fluttering heart and rages on. A rock becomes sepulcher to the uprooted nest. The river could be less cruel, the winter, more forgiving. Someone could have conceived of this world, but for days, no one but a pair of swans bears witness to the earthquake. The strange earth frees itself into unimaginable fissures. The bank splits and pools into the tall prairie, the way a pail of milk might spill across an oak table. Even water will stain the strongest wood. Supposedly, there is quaking, waking what’s left of the neighbors, small animals that somehow survive. What is survival to the breathless that can’t forget? How long was the egret chick left flinching? There are traces of disruption here: feathers without blood, nests without eggs. Devoid of particular destination, another will roost again.
Photo courtesy of Jules Weitz.
America
This afternoon I am well, thank you.
Walking down Main Street in Danville, KY.
The heavy wind so sensuous.
Last night I fell-
ated four different men back in
Philadelphia season lush and slippery
with time and leaves.
Keep your eyes to yourself, yid.
As a kid, I pledged only to engage
in onanism on special holidays.
Luckily, America.
By CLARA CHIU
Photo courtesy of author.
Amherst, Massachusetts
I. Tablecloth Winter
We are holding the edges of the fabric,
throwing the center into the air.
& even in dusk this cloth
billowing over our heads
makes a souvenir of home:
mother & child in snowglobe.
Yet we are warm here, beneath
this dome, & what light slips through
drapes the dining room white.
By AIDAN COOPER
Photo courtesy of author.
Boston, MA
After Frank O’Hara
Father’s Day, it’s 8 a.m. & I’m late on the road
to Boston because I drooled too much sleeping
I’m driving to a Red Sox game, yes I’ll go
because my dad at one point liked the pitcher
& the tank’s too full to not go
when I reach the MFA beehiving with students
I wonder what’s on & it’s Van Gogh’s Roulin Family Portraits
& I want to park there in case I have time to peruse
but it’s 50 bucks & I’m seeing my family anyway
so I circle Huntington until I find an empty spot
on Parker & it’s Sunday so I’m off the hook
& I don’t thank God pay a thing
Photo courtesy of author
Ithaca, NY
I want to start by saying that this is not about when I was in a New York city cab and the cabbie and I struck up a concrete jungle duet about where we were from—Gaza, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Pakistan, Ukraine, India…—and what winds, fair or foul, had blown us to the country that’s being made great again by a certain real estate developer. I want to start by saying that in what I have to say there is no New York City or cabbie. That’s not the kind of story this is. Rather, in this story there is a sister—or sisters—and a land—or lands.
I want to start by saying that I propose, simply, a new topos for going “back home,” for the return to Ithaca. I call this topos Sisterland.
Photos courtesy of author.
Florida
After the Storm
(after Donald Justice)
I will die in Portland on an overcast day,
The Willamette River mirroring clouds’
Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting—
Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets.
They will leave for work barely in time
To catch their railcars. It will happen
On a day like today. Florida’s winter
Brings the satisfaction of sunlit goosebumps
As I read on the veranda wondering whether
To retrieve a sweater. I’m learning
Of life’s many versions of triviality,
Which merely manage to repeat themselves.
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