Kei Lim

Resuscitation

February 7, 2023 Fiction

Swimmer Cyanotype Print by Rosalind Hobley.

A man swims to the left of Julia, and a woman to the right. They are blurs of misted goggles, the glint of a silver, latex cap. They flip like sleek fish at the pool’s wall.

Julia is sure they are having an affair. The two showed up at the same time, splitting the three-lane pool with Julia, who had gotten used to swimming alone. At first, she resented the wake of their bodies in the water—that reminder of competitive sport. She watched as they left the pool, noticing the nod, a touch as they crossed paths at the changing room doors.

Julia is a night swimmer. She likes the pool’s cool indoor lights and the way the black winter sky beyond the glass windows feels framed and distant. The goggles distort her peripheral vision—creating a blue shadow that she imagines as one of the sea creatures she and James used to visit at the aquarium when they first met.

If James were at home, she would tell him about the swimmers, but he is in New Zealand, studying the impact of climate change on a fur seal colony.

Under water, Julia feels the shudder of the commuter train as it passes.

Compression, airway, breath.

Be the stranger who will save your life—

January 2023 Poetry Feature: New Poems by TC Contributors

January 26, 2023 Poetry

New poems by our contributors JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH, BRYCE BERKOWITZ, DEBORAH GORLIN, MATTHEW CAREY SALYER

Table of Contents:

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
—Amygdala Means Almond

Bryce Berkowitz
—The Writers’ Bench in Gapped Couplets

Deborah Gorlin
—The Trouble with Rivers
—Landslide

            Matthew Carey Salyer
                        —The Devil, His Own Self
                        —The Penguin Classics

Effluent of the Affluent

January 18, 2023 Dispatches

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.

Translation: The Wangs’ Other Child

January 5, 2023 Fiction, Translation

Story by MARIO MARTZ

Translated from the Spanish by NINA PERROTTA

Story appears in both English and Spanish

Translator’s Note

One of the first things that struck me about this short story by Mario Martz—and one that I kept in mind as I translated—was the question implicit in the title. Who is the Wangs’ other child?

It seems fairly obvious that the main child, the one who stands in opposition to the titular “other child,” is Mei, the Wangs’ twenty-something daughter, who disappeared while visiting Central America. Mei’s likely murder is what sets the story in motion, prompting the Wangs to move halfway across the world to a country that’s entirely foreign to them.

Translation: “Soy Nobody” by Emily Dickinson

December 10, 2022 Poetry, Translation

Poem by EMILY DICKINSON
Translated into Spanglish by ILAN STAVANS

Soy Nobody
Translation by Ilan Stavans

Soy Nobody! Quién eres tú?
Eres – Nobody – too?
Then somos pareja!
Silencio! lo anunciarán – you know!

You Must Like It All

December 8, 2022 Fiction

By MATHILDE MEROUANI

People were singing on the steps below our living room window, and Elena removed an earphone to tell them to stop.

“You’re singing very badly!” she shouted. “I’m going to throw water on you!”

A man yelled he was too hot anyway. When he said he would like to have water thrown on him, she smiled to herself, closed her eyes, and lay back down on the sofa.

“Careful,” I said. “They might break our window again.”

She said, “It wasn’t them.”

“I know,” I said. “Obviously. I meant ‘they’ in the general sense.”

She put her earphone back in.

I put down my pen, and watched her. I had done that, every now and then, since we were six years old—stopped what I was doing to figure out something about her, to think about her face, or her hair, or the way she always laughed when I talked about death. Mostly I thought about her face. I had done that so often, by now, that I was convinced she must know, and must sometimes arrange herself to give me a good view, to give me time to look, to give me time to think about her textures. I hated it when I saw her do it with other people.

The fan was only disturbing the tips of her hair at the end of her low ponytail—the top, a little greasy, was tight on her skull. She wore pajama shorts, and, as always, when she wore shorts or skirts, I got stuck on the blond hairs on her thighs. And then I moved up, and got stuck on her skin. Like wax. Like alive wax. Wax that would not melt.

Present Tense Machine: A Review

November 17, 2022 Reviews

By GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG (Translated from the Norwegian by KARI DICKSON)

Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG

Laura is expecting a baby. A twenty-four-year-old literature instructor, she lives with her partner Karl Peter in the heart of Bergen, a city in the westernmost part of Norway. She’s suffering from a strange sort of anxiety, which she suspects has something to do with the pregnancy: everything around her seems double, not quite like what it is.

Laura has more common anxieties as well, including a problem with her apartment. The buildings in her part of town are constructed of brick on the outside and wood inside, which makes them so flammable that they’re called “chimney houses.” If their chimney house were to catch on fire, there would be little chance of escape. Then, there are the noisy students living above and below, a drug dealer across the street, hypodermic needles littering the neighborhood. She decides that she and Karl Peter have to move before the baby comes, but this decision, too, seems to bring her nothing but anxiety.

Translation: The Men Go to War

November 7, 2022 Fiction, Translation

Story by TOMÁS DOWNEY

Translated from the Spanish by SARAH MOSES

The piece appears below in both English and Spanish.

Translator’s Note

When I first read Tomás Downey’s story, “Los hombres van a la guerra,” I reread it. This was the ending’s doing: it called into question all that came prior, as the best endings do (I think here of Alice Munro). So I had an ulterior motive for translating the story: I wanted to understand how Tomás had put it together, how he’d written towards that ending. I’m not convinced I’ve figured it out. But in a sense, translating the story was studying it, and I hope that something of the circular way it works makes its way into my own writing. I hope, too, that readers of “The Men Go to War” have a similar experience: that the ending directs them back to the beginning for a second read.

— Sarah Moses

[ Heart Fragments ]

October 31, 2022 Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Issues, Poetry

By JOSEPH O. LEGASPI

When you touch me I light up into funereal pyre. In the consummation, by char and carbon, brittle is not my name. I tongue flame and soot and singe. Fire to our forests, fuel for restless fires. Fantastical firebrands undergoing scorching metamorphoses. Oh, love, ether.

Which One is the Lifeline?

October 31, 2022 Essays, Issue 24, Issue 24 Essays, Podcasts & Audio

By ALEXIS M. WRIGHT

The Common Magazine · “Which One Is The Lifeline?” by Alexis M. Wright

I could tell you,
If I wanted to,
What makes me
What I am.

But I don’t
Really want to—
And you don’t
Give a damn.

—Langston Hughes, “Impasse”

There are two cops from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department standing in my grandmother’s kitchen. We are all gathered around the kitchen island silently negotiating the power dynamics. Two Black women, two White cops. The cops have come to collect the details for the report, but I’m doing most of the talking. Grammy bears witness.

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