All posts tagged: Dispatches

Into the Woods

By ANNE P. BEATTY

person with an orange bag walking through the dirt paths in a sun-spotted forest

Stone Mountain, North Carolina

A mile into the woods, I am always slightly afraid. Fear’s lace knots the cuff of an otherwise lovely afternoon. Nights, when I peek out of the tent, the moon is a bright friend too far away to help.

Into the Woods
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Four Country Sonnets (with Attachments)

By G.G. HARROW

Image of the Cumberland Gap Tunnel

Eastern Kentucky

After Terrance Hayes and Wanda Coleman


Attachment 1

country music is Black — indigenous — immigrant — almost successfully paved over — i made these poems from 36 common words in top-selling country songs since the ’90s according to a concert ticket corporation

Four Country Sonnets (with Attachments)
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Wonder

By DARLENE WEST

A black bear faces the camera close-up and head-on. Its eyes glow white. The image was taken in black-and-white night vision. The frame indicates that it was captured at 12:34 AM on September 26, 2019. The upper-right corner indicates the temperature and moon phase.

British Columbia, Canada     

In the mornings, I like to follow our border collie on his nose-to-the-ground rounds: out to the creek at the edge of our land; up to the vegetable garden near the foothills; across the back yard. Sometimes, the hair on the back of his neck stands up.  

Our farm land in southern British Columbia borders a mountainous wilderness. My husband and I find curiosities on our property all the time: peaches picked from our trees; tunnels under our fences; grape cluster stems, cleaned of berries. Now and then, feeding our fascination with the unknown: strips of grass, chiseled out of the lawn, coiled like jelly rolls. What roams around here at night after we turn out the lights? 

Wonder
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Slaughterhouse-Vibe

By LISA ROSENBERG

 

an image of a woman among old artifacts. the woman's back is to the photographer and she is facing the open door

 

Hydra, Greece

There are no streetlights between the old slaughterhouse and the edge of town. The road that links them feels longer than its few hundred barren meters, proceeding above a rocky slope that ends in channel water—the former landing place of blood and entrails, arriving by chute while dogfish gathered. Six nights per week, a young woman makes her way along this route, tiny phone-light in hand, walking toward the main village on the Greek island of Hydra. Her name is Marina. I’ve known her since she was a child.

Slaughterhouse-Vibe
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Still Life 3: The Suburbs

By KELLY McMASTERS 

A child in a car seat through the car window
Long Island, NY

Interior of a silver Volvo wagon, back door pockets stuffed with Candy Ring wrappers, pencils, and rocks; I am looking in the rear-view mirror or over my right shoulder into the backseat, my left hand on the wheel, right hand on the seat back next to me. Two small boys, both with eyes the exact color as my own, stare back at me, pleading or explaining or demanding or questioning or laughing or crying or sulking or fighting or trying to hide. The car smells vaguely Cheerio-like. No matter the music, the soundtrack is chatter and the rhythmic kicking of a seat back. They also like punching each other’s seat warmer buttons with their feet to be annoying.

Still Life 3: The Suburbs
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Dispatch from Moscow, Idaho

By AFTON MONTGOMERY

A snowy field in Moscow, Idaho
Moscow, ID

The neighbor children are in the Evangelical cult that Vice and The Guardian wrote about last year. They’re not allowed to speak to us, which is a thing no one has ever said aloud but is true, nonetheless. This town is full of true things that no one says aloud because we can’t or wouldn’t dare or because no one would believe us anyway. 

Marilynne Robinson, I think, or maybe Ruth Ozeki, wrote something about how the wheat here is green before it’s yellow and everyone from elsewhere gets to selectively forget that and picture us golden and glowing year-round. 

Dispatch from Moscow, Idaho
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Monsoon

 By URVI KUMBHAT

Palm tree and building at dusk

Kolkata, India

From my window I see a boy shaking the bougainvillea 
for flowers. My parents talk of pruning it. They talk 
of little else. The tree, spilling wildly past our house into 
the gulley—where boys come to smoke or piss, lanky against 
betel-dyed walls—acrid ammonia, posters begging for 
votes, pink crowning above them. The boys linger even 
when it rains. Each drop caught briefly under 
the golden streetlight, and me, holding my breath. 

Monsoon
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Effluent of the Affluent

By MARY BERGMAN

Sewer Bed Beach, Nantucket, MA

 

We are losing this place twice over: first to money, and then to sea. There are ways to quantify these losses: only 3,200 bushels of scallops were caught this past winter and more than $2 billion in real estate transactions were recorded last year. My parents aren’t sure where they should be buried; all the graveyards in all the towns we have ever lived will one day be inundated. I imagine horseshoe crabs trolling along the bottom, pausing to read the names etched on headstones.

All over the island, it looms: this is the end of something. I walk along the dune-tops, what’s left of them, at the very end of South Shore Road. Over one shoulder is the Atlantic; endless. Over the other are the sewer beds. A sandy strip separates the two. Second homes are not the only creatures perched precariously on eroding shorelines. Our wastewater treatment facility hangs in the balance.

Effluent of the Affluent
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