Buone Vacanze

Dispatches will be taking a vacation during the month of August. In the meantime, please take a virtual vacation with some of our recent dispatches: Join Julia Lichtblau as she contemplates economics in sun-soaked Lisbon; Maura Candela as she stumbles upon her husband’s roots in Sicily; James Gill as he recalls a paradise lost in Canada’s Saskatchewan prairies, and Todd Pitock as he gazes up at the cold night sky in one of the hottest places on earth.

Or, peruse our archives where you can browse dispatches by location.

See you in September!

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Buone Vacanze

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A horseshoe crab on the sand

Cape May, midsummer

EVELYN MAGUIRE
I become a house lived-in. Living in my mother’s house, again, it’s easy to drift into the past. Blue bottle light, dust motes, a silver rattle. The sound of it: butterfly wings. I am tender towards everything. Everything is a child and I am everything’s mother.

The Ground That Walks

ALAA ALQAISI
We stepped out with our eyes uncovered. / Gaza kept looking through them— / green tanks asleep on roofs, a stubborn gull, / water heavy with scales at dawn. // Nothing in us chose the hinges to slacken. / The latch turned without our hands. / Papers practiced the border’s breath.

Tethered Hearts

LARA ATALLAH
The city is angry with love. Its sidewalks echo Beirut, and a life there, long-forgotten, languishing in the rearview mirror. Everywhere I look, an almost-déjà-vu skims the walls of my mind. Buenos Aires is Beirut, is Paris, is an aubade to the lost and never found. Down by Recoleta, Haussmann buildings dot the avenues.