Avon Valley, Western Australia
Just below, a roo doe digs into the softest
soil it can find — avoiding rocks — to make
a hollow for itself and the joey heavy in its pouch;
it lifts, digs, turns drops lifts digs turns drops.
By SARA ELKAMEL
Camels on the Moon, 2021, Mixed media and collage on cardboard. Artwork by Sara Elkamel.
Cairo, Egypt
When you’re not looking
I try on your big brown shoes,
pick a spot to run to, practice ducking
from winged pellets on the street—
By ARIEL CHU
Taipei, Taiwan, December 2020
The three of us—Frances, Jay, and I—live in this rain-slick city, concrete buildings stained with runoff. At night, the streets stretch like black pools, glossy with reflected traffic lights. We stumble around half-closed night markets with our snapped umbrellas and damp socks. Our pockets weighted with bruised change, we eat charred oyster mushrooms crusted with cumin and rose salt, waiting out the rain under fluorescent storefront awnings.
By PATRICIA LIU
Yunnan Province, China
Paper is thin. In the beginning, still billows in the wind, still petal-like, still grounded in this world
of living. The incense is the only material that translates the viscera to mist. Early, the fog has not yet
lifted, and we move through the white drip as if through total darkness. Fish lost in the deep under-
water. It is easy for water to find home in our bodies. How wonderful it is to think my father’s
dead father a translation of our living selves, the water in-between my cells, the same water of
ghosts. Of women and Buddha, of lotus flower and palace, of lion. See the shine of fire, even
now. See the smoke, encapsulated by the fog. My father tells stories of the state’s inexorable beckoning,
the brothers, and the sisters, too, sent to the countryside. What they remember most is the truck
and the dust, the broad shoulders of horse, that first night and its stars, the mass exodus of dragonflies
following the monsoons—but no, exodus is uniquely a human endeavor. My father cannot bring
himself to anger; he knows it is shame that is the ugliest language. Somewhere, I have lost my place
in the life-wheel, and the only words I know in Chinese are our names. Jiayu is rain. Jialei is rosebud.
Only years later do I learn that Jiayu means jade. Only years later do I long for pure, unadulterated
fortune over the ritual of early rain. Somehow, turn face to sky. Here. In memory, to burn is to revere.
Grand Bay, Alabama
Tonapah Desert, Arizona
At night from this distance, the twin rivers of car lights, red and white, barely seem to move along the I-10, even though I know from experience they’re traveling upwards of 80 mph. Most people see this stretch of empty desert between Phoenix and the California border as nothing worth slowing down to consider—the different personalities of the Saguaro, some with broken limbs or holes made by woodpeckers, or the colored bands of rock created by volcanic uplift or erosion from some previous era when there was measurable rainfall here — it all looks the same from blurred car windows.
By SARA ELKAMEL
Tents in a Bedouin-style camp at the Wadi Rum desert in southern Jordan. Courtesy: Soraya Ghezelbash.
Wadi Rum, Jordan
for Yvonne
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
that tips the scale. I run away like a ghost, a demon, a silent drum
in the faultless dark. Not a quiver of light around my bones.
By ABBIE KIEFER
Gardiner, Maine
Raw granite and brick, hip roof like a helmet. At its height, it hummed: seventeen trains daily, lumbering in along the river. I imagine E.A. here with his ticket and his trunk. With his back to the brick, listening for a whistle.
Now the depot is a cannabis dispensary. They keep records in the ticket booth, make brownies in the basement. Preservationists call this adaptive reuse.
Rhodes, Greece
At the Mandraki I saw three medieval windmills standing on the pier like heavy friars with their brownish cloaks, also the statues of two Rhodian fallow deer, a buck and a doe, symbols of the island. A theory persists that Crusaders brought deer to the island because their antlers secrete an alkali substance that repels snakes. Standing at the marina I gazed at the platoni, which are smaller than other types of deer, reaching only one meter in height. Their brown coats acquire white mottles in summer, while in winter they darken. Rhodes’s ancient name was Ophiusa, which in old Greek means a place filled with snakes. “That’s why you see cats everywhere,” one of the islanders told me. “They are the guardians of the island. They kill the snakes.”
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