LitFest 2021 Excerpt: Interior Chinatown
CHARLES YU
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. You are not Kung Fu Guy. You are currently Background Oriental Male, but you’ve been practicing. Maybe tomorrow will be the day. Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
Delusions of Grandeur
A. NATASHA JOUKOVSKY
There is something post-decadent about Versailles in winter. The fountains are off; there are not many tourists. Everything is still fiercely geometric and over-the-top, but in this gray, expired kind of way, at least most of the day; the crisp chill of nighttime being an exception.
February 2021 Poetry Feature
REBECCA MORGAN FRANK
Nineteenth-century body snatchers / dug down to the head / and roped the body up, / chucked jewels back to dirt, little interest / in mementos, only / the corpses themselves. / That’s how we learned our bodies had a life / on their own, a worth / without us. / We can freeze and sell our eggs...
Writers on Writing: David Moloney
DAVID MOLONEY
I tried to write true stories but fictionalize them by merely changing names. I didn’t want to betray the truth. But I found that the stories were coming off as if a stranger sat down next to you at the bar and started telling you about their life. They were annoyingly uninteresting.
The Language of the Body
SARA ELKAMEL
We pull the black of Rum over our eyes / like skin. God’s earth is vast, vast, vast—but by day / she wrapped her limbs around my limbs and drew / my air. I follow her into the dark, consider saying: Please, / I don’t know what you need—but all I see is red. / At the foot of the dunes I push her, soft as the sin
Friday Reads: February 2021
Curated by ISABEL MEYERS
Like du Maurier’s more famous Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel takes place in a manor house in the British countryside and involves wealthy people with dark secrets. Main character Phillip despises his deceased cousin’s wife, Rachel—for isn’t she simply trying to steal his fortune?—until he falls in love with her, until he comes to despise her again, because perhaps she is trying to steal his fortune after all.
- RUI CARDOSO MARTINS There are two twin girls in the courtroom. They look very much alike, with fine blonde hair, tightly bound, and short, pretty noses. One can see they have not yet reached the point in life where twins become separate.
- DELAINA THOMAS I walk to the park / drummers sit in a circle under a white tent / they have drifted this far way on pacific waves / long feathers tucked behind their ears / they sweat in soft fringed hides / their faces lean and dark / I walk past a stall of frybread...
- ADRIENNE SU When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center, / the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown. / Jews had been in Henan so close to forever, / they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had found / an exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases. / Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.
- FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack / as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks, // not black rock or islands of fog rising individual / in a barrenness of salt. It is not that // it was not beautiful, but that I tried to conjure / its momentous light, eternal // that is inside the…
- ELIANE MARQUES We are full of bullets from AKs in our heads and in our necks / With stray slugs that enter our bones our backs / We are in the Ecstasy neighborhood / But not dying of love. // Starting yesterday / If anyone wants to kill me with love that raises the voice at my side...
- BRUCE BOND When the smoke cleared and took with it the sirens / and the uniforms strung across our sofas, / what remained were rivers, mist, whisper as a habit, / red dawn in the eyes of the sleep-deprived. / In the brush, here and there, beside the highway, / the revenant scent of metal and decay.
- JOÃO LUÍS BARRETO GUIMARÃES For a minute they believe in / the art of a fresh start / in a country where the ministry ceases to inaugurate / the ruins of / our dreams. Far away / a common lymph runs in Europe’s rivers / (like a crack in a wall hesitating in advance...)
- DEBORAH LINDSAY WILLIAMS “We need to do more, Mom,” my son tells me. He’s fifteen, supports the Kurdish resistance and fancies himself an anarcho-socialist (“It’s not like being an anarchist, Mom, okay?”).
- JOSÉ PINTO DE SÁ Papá announced, “Maria, I’m going to war,” and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. Mamã, clearing the table, gave her usual start. She stood stranded in the kitchen doorway, a dirty plate in each hand. Going to war meant going out in the dead of night to David’s bar...
- KANYA KANCHANA Give me / a circle, a halo, a circumscription, / a sphere of eleven dimensions, / a list of lists, a key. / Give me / a thunderstorm poncho, / an endangered turtleshell, / a backpack no heavier than 12 kilos, / a cave. / Give me a terrace of food, / a garden of songs, / a communal lovebowl, / a lab.
- KC TROMMER Inside the bounded mercury, / we keep going. All circuits that close / make serpents of us, constrict / and envelop every tender corner until / only a small portion / is distinct, our feet dangling like the end of a / sentence. We suspend ourselves / in a room full of light but take none in.
- LANDA WO Little Cabindan history / All the Cabindan strategies were there / To mount the portrait of a free Cabinda. / The historic chief discoursed on education / The Cabindan earth sketched a faint smile. / The old lion of the FLEC / Brought the discussion round to multi-partyism
- EDGAR GARBELOTTO Fighting against the slowdown of the pills, C sits in front of the dressing table and hates what she sees: an ancient face with new furrows, an aged reflection of whom she thought she still was, a worsened version of herself.
- LATOYA FAULK What of those like Grandma who refused continual abuse and letdowns? There is so little talk of Black women who age and come to find endless love in the companionship of their children. These are women like Grandma who find peace in homeplace without husbands and have few regrets for leaving...
- RODNEY A. BROWN 35 Enter inhale. Enter time. Enter inheritance. / Enter or else. Enter doors with handles, / without handles, manually manipulated. Enter alone / feelings. Enter tension. Struggle entering / bitterness enter. Love turning towards lust enter. / Historic languages enter.
- TEOLINDA GERSÃO The reason I first donated sperm wasn’t to fill the world with my children, but to get money to buy a new skateboard and go to the movies more often. I didn’t think it would change me. I was a young man then. It was an act as simple and banal, I thought, as donating blood or bone…
- JOAQUIM ARENA But it was no less true that Cape Verdeans in the U.S.—be they white, mixed-race, or Black—went to great pains to distinguish themselves from American Blacks. All Cape Verdeans, a mixed-race island people, feared being “mistaken” for ordinary Blacks…
- LEONARDO TONUS they say that the most impressive of all crossings / is not thirst / or the fear / afterwards. / The humiliation / no longer wounds / what does not exist / they say / bodies in a boat / of bodies / veins / eyes / skin / penis / nails / vagina / cries // they say that the most terrible of all…
- CLARA OBLIGADO She didn’t pick me up at the airport, and later stopped having me over because she considered me dangerous. I decided it wasn’t worth maintaining a relationship with someone who only worried about her own safety, even when she was thousands of miles from danger.
- BRUCE SNIDER Looking out at the blue sky / we listen to news / of men in Chechnya. Touching / counters, our washrags move like ghosts. / You sweep the kitchen. I tend the cry / of the washing machine, the low roof / that is our only roof. / We’ve never seen the sky / in Chechnya…
- SHAUNA BARBOSA The wolf belongs to the boy I to the wolf / I ask permission to still be myself this time of night. / Sem barriga, sem fome, sem bebida. Blue notes / from a dead man’s tribute creep up my balcony. / Damn, you know how you know a song, / but don’t know a song?
- STEVEN LEYVA Given this ruddy, straightened wig no one could place / my face on a spectral scale of “ethnic.” I slid / on and off stage. I spoke plain. I didn’t name names. Some / audiences mistook me for Muscogee Creek. I spoke / in first person. Under that wig I wore cornrows / in Oklahoma’s emaciated winter.
- RICHARD ZENITH For Pessoa it would prove to be an annus mirabilis, but the early months of 1914 already portended catastrophe for Portugal and the rest of Europe. Lisboners were not especially fazed by the train strike in January...
- ANANDA LIMA I close my right eye meu olho direito / and see everything tudo que / my mother my father meus pais no meu país / didn’t / know não sabiam / to do tudo / then que fazer? / e hoje, minha vista cansada / not a matter of laziness / the doctor says / it’s more mais mas / of a suppression
- JOSÉ LUÍS PEIXOTO Alone, I arrive in a looted city / and walk slowly, my arms hanging / loosely, I look through open doors, / what remains is scattered in the streets, / the air is clean because no one is breathing / it, this city, this silence, this city...
- KATHERINE VAZ I have yet to meet anyone who understands so well as my father how affection longs to travel far into a silence so deep it hums. And I would close my eyes when the foghorns blew, adding to my sense that real joy sounds like mournfulness, which he would explain...
- MATILDE CAMPILHO On the night Billy Ray was born / (New York, 28th and 7th) / not one soul contemplated the geraniums / There was, however, the sound of the world falling / like multiple stalactites / in the area surrounding the hospital / Cars, some at 60 mph, others at 25 / Firefighters rushing to save a dog...
- JENNIFER ACKER In 1969, my grandfather gave the keynote address to the Master Brewers Association of America. He was not a brewer himself, but he had worked thirty years as a consultant to the industry, and by this time he had provided advice to breweries in every state of America and seventy countries.
- FÁTIMA POLICARPO I opened my eyes to darkness and knew I was not alone. She stood in the far corner by the closet, waiting for something. The air between us, a conduit—even from across the room, I felt her body tingling my skin. You don’t always have to see a thing to know it exists.
- PETER COOLEY So much for the wound in me / seeking a piebald answer / in the tulip’s streak cataracted by first frost, / the blue jay flapping across the grass, / one-winged, his flying / this crawl through blades he hues, / tenor and vehicle this bird and me, / both of us trying to accept / such ritual…
- ROBERT CORDING The royal palms bathe in the soft warm air /of February and everywhere I look there is the play / of glittering afternoon light—on store windows / and metal bistro tables, on the well-polished / always white Mercedes and Lexuses, on the sorbet / pinks and oranges...
- JARID ARRAES tell me / about how tough everything is / and even the beer’s out of reach / and even writing has dried up / tell me / about sudden setbacks / and tight turns / about abandoned / books / exhibitions empty / of meaning / talk to me / about the smothering / routine / with the same words...
- HÉLIO PÓLVORA The man gazes at the slope climbing to Olivença square. He doesn’t need to go up there to know that the small, circular plaza, carpeted with grass, has a large cross and a white church—and that from there, as far as the eye can see, the coast, bordered with coconut palms, lies shimmering in the distance.
- SUSANA MOREIRA MARQUES It begins with her saying I’ve never told anyone and ends with me saying Neither have I. And in between, a single sentence on how the love we feel for a child is not necessarily immediate, on how we need time to get to know and fall in love. We talk over the phone; this may never…
- CRISTINA CARLOS In the playground, I didn’t count / I didn’t figure in games, I didn’t exist / No matter how right I was in the classroom
- PETER LABERGE Back in America, we’re still waiting for boys to die queerly. We’ve learned to expect it: the cops parked at the mailbox & ringing the doorbell, a mother afraid to answer, burying her scream in an apron in a moonlit kitchen. In Berlin, in the translation of afternoon...
- IAIN TWIDDY As if he was pelting for a winter, / his hair returning, the closer he gets, / to that flossy, watchful, infant softness, / like the idea of an angel’s wing; / and how would it feel, as cotton as snow, / … should I reach out, / cup his skull as he once must have mine…
- JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER If not for the lust of women, there would be no alphabet. / Save for the breaking of traffic rules, there would be / no Cubism; no fractured light scrutinized from subways / or kaleidoscopes in the tool belts of surveyors.
- SILVIA SPRING James was tall, long-limbed, with dark hair he had to brush away from his eyes before shaking my hand. Katie busied herself cleaning, washing a frying pan whose nonstick surface had burnt off the middle and then rinsing the plates under a swan-necked faucet.
- OONA PATRICK The Alentejo is the landscape of heartbreak. Or at least it was to me. Even its trees are clearly loners, set apart from each other at distant intervals across miles of sere brown fields. The Alentejo is all about waiting, with its numbered cork trees, their skinned underbellies...
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