Dispatches

They Say You Are Everywhere

By KRISTA J.H. LEAHY

colorado from car

Unincorporated Arapahoe County, Colorado

 

Through mantle, earth, gender, air
                        through false stories and true
undistracted by pectin, pucker, time
                         scale, sugar, seed, dripped rainbow of
oil, prism, crushed berry residue,
                         om of home, acid, oxygen song—
I grip jelly jars to my eyes
                         mock binocular my way to You—

They Say You Are Everywhere
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How Memory Works

By TIM TIM CHENG

 

A shattered porcelain shard of a city drawing laid on a white background.

“Newspaper Transferral on Plaster” by Hasami Ho (2020)

 

Location: Hong Kong

 
         on the sudden closure of Apple Daily, the biggest pro-democracy press in Hong Kong

1.
We see the newspaper for tomorrow, not tomorrow
It’s already midnight. Today that is. News that stays
warm and inky on our fingertips at 2:30 am.

How Memory Works
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In Absence of Mourning

By NATALIA MAGNANI

Chebrushka teddy bear

Gomel, Belarus

It had been fifteen years since my family left for the US, but my grandparents’ room in Gomel had not changed. I sat on the same Soviet-era sofa, holding the same replica of Cheburashka, my childhood-favorite TV character. The occasion of my visit had prompted Dedushka, my Belarusian grandpa, to take me to the village where he was born, now dilapidated, to generations of ancestors’ graves, through documents that told something of our fragmented history. One evening Dedushka donned his army uniform, and presented me with a newspaper clip detailing my father’s death. My grandmother was quiet, resigned to the shadows of old books and toys.

In Absence of Mourning
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Quarters

By BEINA XU

children biking on streetBerlin, Germany

 

I live in the wrong colonial quarter of Berlin.

My neighborhood is called Afrikanisches Viertel, and my flat is on Guinea Street. There’s Kongostraße, Togostraße, Kamerunerstraße, Transvaalstraße, Sansibarstraße, Otawistraße—I could go on, but you could also just Google Germany’s colonial conquest of Africa.

Quarters
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R Is for Revival Field

By WILLIAM WOOLFITT

St. Paul, Minnesota

a lake with trees in the distance

 

R is for raw sewage, riverine wetland, rubbish, rookery of herons and egrets, rusting barrels of toxic waste. I try to imagine all of this at Pig’s Eye Lake. Surrounding it, marsh, cottonwoods, floodplain, bluffs above the great river. It’s a place the Dakota consider sacred, James Rock says. Čhokáŋ Taŋka, the Dakota call it: the big middle. I try to imagine the burial mounds that were blown up with dynamite, and railyards, locks and dams, dredging, and all the household trash that was dumped in the marsh, the industrial debris: lead-acid batteries, solvents, electrical transformers, burnt sludge. Eight million cubic yards, some of it fluorosurfectants—the so-called forever chemicals needed to make non-stick frying pans, stain-repellent for couches and rugs—the PFOS that have spread everywhere, now taint my blood, and yours, and every creature’s.

R Is for Revival Field
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Magic Mile

by CAROLYN OLIVER

Picture of a motor speedway in New Hampshire. There are cloudy gray skies and a barren roadway with a lone red flag waving at the center.

 

Dispatch from New Hampshire Motor Speedway

 

The track is too slick, too cold. As the preacher intones Let us drive fast and cheer hard in Jesus’ name amen, the mist is already falling over us, the drivers, the life flight helicopter at rest on its helipad over the rise. Engines fire and the air goes thick with pressure. In minutes the leaders spin into the wall’s invisible give. Unlike Daytona or Talladega, where drivers shimmy from the windows of their wrecks, walking bruises at best—this is a minor crash. Its smolder mingles with exhaust, burning rubber, spent fireworks, cigarette smoke sent into the low cloudbank by a man ten paces past the No Smoking sign. This is New Hampshire: live free or die.

Magic Mile
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What the Midwest Was Like

By JENNIFER S. CHENG

Small plants grow outside the window of a house. The window frame is white, with paint that is peeling slightly.

 

Iowa City, Iowa

 

For months I cared for my plant: watered it, brought in light, cleaned its jar. I noted with pleasure when new leaves began to sprout. The capillary green that unfolded overnight. I watched its roots mingle and spread, tracing against the glass. Don’t forget to watch over the plant. But when I returned from four days away, half of the leaves had yellowed. One fell off at my touch. I watched as a fifth leaf began also to lose its pigment.

What the Midwest Was Like
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Two Poems by John Harlan Underhill

By JOHN HARLAN UNDERHILL

Spider web with light shining through it

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Following his 60th class reunion at Amherst College in 2017, Harlan Underhill scripted a virtual diary in poetry, communicating over 200 entries to several fortunate classmates. The poems illuminate both immediate and past experiences and observations, memories both cherished and painful. These two poems are drawn from that collection.

Two Poems by John Harlan Underhill
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Delete/Recover

By AKWE AMOSU

Image of a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in NYC, with someone holding up a sign saying "No Justice, No Peace." 
New York City

After Kenosha, Wisconsin, 26 August 2020

1. Erasure

I went to the         for water, 
although I had no thirst, again 
unable to find           Not sleeping, 
roaming restless, hunting 
at 2am for             on my phone, 
no rabbit hole too deep, however 
dull, aching tired as though 
I had been              
Only three days into this, 
asked how my              was 
going, I launched into a tense             
            that the question even 
deserved              and saw how hard, 
again, I was trying not to            the 
plain fact that right in front of us,
again, the cop had emptied 
his          into a human, 
now                  yet shackled 
to his hospital bed.  That again, a 
young          had taken down a human 
with a military grade             yet 
          away from the scene unhindered. 
And that, again, we were being asked
to choke off              thoughts, stifle 
any            sound, stave and belt 
the chest to                our agitation, 
keep breathing because, again,
we
      

Delete/Recover
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