Whatever Walden is to me—we swam there two Julys—
I hope to skirt that never-ending trope,
Drowning like a pilgrim in that pond.
We pushed past mothers and their kids,
Cedared summers in Wellfleet cottages,
Past foreign languages that hummed across
The narrow circle of that one dirt path
The creature was flushed from the snow
& flung like a tiny, limp footbag
before I could catch up to cup it below
my hands. While they collared the dog,
By BOTHAYNA AL-ESSA
Translated from the Arabic by SAWAD HUSSAIN
(1)
In those days, everyone had the right to have feelings.
It was natural to feel things, and the right thing to do about your feelings was to make them known. Feelings were plenty, but broadly they were segregated into two groups: Love and Fear.
In those days, there was only one way you could sin: by faking your feelings.
A public square in every town, monuments
whitened in patches by lime and bird droppings.
Streets and bridges named after those who came
in galleons. They banished to the outskirts
By JASSIM AL-SHAMMARIE
Translated from the Arabic by MAIA TABET
I feel the wall with my bare hands, the peeling paint, the cracks along its surface…. They’re just superficial and haven’t impacted the solid masonry. There’s no light coming through.
The soaring, towering wall is solid; it is two lights and one darkness long. This is how I measure the passage of time in the endless enclosure of this space, either as glaring light or as pitch darkness…. Once, to figure out how long it was, I hugged the wall, reaching its farthest edge after two lights and one darkness. Truth be told, this exhausted me, and I may have slept one or two lights without knowing it.
Close your trap. Everyone you’ve ever lost lost
everything. Life’s closed. It’s not even close. At least
they aren’t distant. As if a stiff flick to existence
flung them unfetchably far to the shadiest suburbs
of substance, where no wintry entropy disturbs
Eastern Shore, Maryland
My late husband was a man who invented facts. He was Danish by birth, and at a dinner party he mentioned that aardvark was Danish for hard work. “Copenhagen households keep them to clean the floors,” he said. Our otherwise intelligent friends, who hadn’t been to Denmark, believed him.
By SYLVIA IPARRAGUIRRE
Translated from the Spanish by EMILY HUNSBERGER
The following is a translated excerpt from the novel Antes que desaparezca by Sylvia Iparraguirre, published in 2021 by Alfaguara.
—
Unannounced, the past invades the Russian literature class one autumn morning in Buenos Aires. I’m facing one of the windows of the museum library, talking about Pushkin. It’s raining outside and I allow myself a few seconds’ pause—after all, I’m the one teaching the class—to linger on the beauty of the rain falling on the sculptures in the modern interior courtyard, the clear water sliding down the bronze.
This piece is excerpted from We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman, a guest at Amherst College’s 2023 LitFest. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary life.
“What do you think happens after you die?” she says. “Oh!” I say. “Gosh.”
I was raised in a fully atheist household, so not much is the short answer. “Just toss me in the dumpster when I go!” my dad likes to announce, and when I’m like, “Um, Dad, I think funerals are actually more about—” he interrupts me. “In the dumpster!” “Okay!” I say. “The dumpster it is!”
ROBIN McLEAN met JIM SHEPARD in a fiction workshop in Italy in 2013, two years after she’d finished her MFA in fiction, two years after she’d sworn off all workshops forever. But she’d read a few of Jim’s stories by then and was hooked. She’s worked with Jim on many stories since, has followed him and Karen Shepard around. Many do. Robin generally shows up with a pile of questions, often about agency or “rate of revelation” or “subliminal coordinates.” If you don’t know what those are, sign up for a workshop with Jim Shepard.
Here are some inquiries asked and answered on a spring pilgrimage to Western Mass in 2022, a sunny morning on a snowy hilltop, an icon of an old tape deck set on RECORD between cups of coffee, three dogs hunting crumbs around the table, then basking in the sun as the ideas flowed.
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