By LEILA CHATTI
Around me, the stubborn trees. Here
I was sad and not sad, I looked up
at a caravan of clouds. Will you ever
speak to me again, beyond
By JADE SONG
Hu Tianbao waves to asphalt and sky. The bumper of his mother’s car has long since exited the drop-off zone, yet he still stands moving his arm in the building’s entrance doorway. Left right left right dawdles his hand. A farewell to punctuality. He’s alone, everyone else already nestled in their classrooms, reciting poems.
Grandfather’s drawing of author when young
1.
Memory, that elusive quicksilver running through our lives. How at first, at birth, there is nothing, really, almost nothing, and how slowly it develops after that, all the years when there is no visible shadow on the ground behind us. And how it is that, for those years, we accept our lives as the steady panorama of whatever is right in front of us, moment to moment.
I’m trying to think when any memory worth remarking arrived. Did I have memories when I was ten years old? I know that in sixth grade, when we were all leaving behind Walnut Lake, our red-brick school, there was some inkling. Not a procession of memories, not yet, but rather an inchoate nostalgia, a definite sense of something being lost. There came an awareness of the past, and with it the realization that there is a kind of timeline, a sense of futurity that had not really been there before.
By TREY MOODY
My grandmother likes to tell me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
say anything back. We’re eating spaghetti
while I visit from far away. My grandmother
just turned ninety-four and tells me dogs
understand everything you say, they just can’t
and Ida B. Wells, well, frustrated
the engenderment of the official record;
crisscrossed the country interviewing
poplars that had been accessories to atrocities,
not unlike that which felled her dear friend
Thomas Moss in Memphis, what became the lynch-
pin to her crusade though he specifically
never dangled from a wooden limb
like natural confections scanned for bruises
in the produce section of People’s Grocery.
There is no justice here, he’s believed
to have said before being proven
correct, after the mob descended on his jail cell
with cocked weapons, wearing black masks, blacker
even than those that frame ivory teeth trained
to curvature by the terror of sudden swings
in white men’s temperament: teeth, it was told
around town after town, that rot from the sugar
of white women, sugar that black men steal,
which makes the bloodshed that much sweeter,
worth snapping necks for like stalks of sugarcane,
to say nothing of the black women left hanging at all.
The big lie looms large over the ripening fruits,
standing on their porches with shotguns loaded—
or with their luggage packed, prepared to spread wing
and fly before they’re flown up the bark of a tree
with hounds nipping at their heels and bulbs flashing
for the morning newspapers where it would read
that a dangerous deviant was sentenced to death
by a coalition of concerned citizens: a red record
printed authoritatively in black until a black woman—
Ida B.—took her proverbial red pen to the horrid story
and made history retract its initial word on the subject,
though not its inherent threat which is set in tombstone.
Courtesy Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Telepathologies, Doppelgangbanger, and It’s Important I Remember (forthcoming). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
By TAHIR ANNOUR
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM
Dew
Uncle Musa died. A year after his passing, my father headed north. He said he would be back in a month.
It all happened so fast I barely caught it, like a migratory bird resting in a dark corner of the forest, like all the things that crowd my memory. No sooner do they appear than they vanish. When I try to recall the details, to understand what happened, none of it makes sense. Time lures the mind into letting go, submitting to the abyss, but I know the mind is capable of reaching into the well of the past. All these memories, from time to time they pierce through the pitch-black darkness. They gleam and fade into the shadows of this exile, of this rotten world.
On one of the shadowy days before his departure, I accompanied my father to the farm. It was the afternoon. Our farm was just outside the village. People were drying their earthenware in the sun: cups, bowls, pots, censers, jars. Children ran around them and erected little churches. They waded deep into the mud, sinking their hands in as if into spilled blood—the blood of an offering, perhaps—smearing their faces and tossing it at one another. They yelled and called each other names. Their clothes were the color of rust, their faces crocodile-like.
The days seem kindlier near sunset, easier
when they are softly falling away
with that feeling of sad happiness
that we call moved, moved that we are moved
and maybe imagining in the dimming
all over town of hurry and resentment
that difficult loves rekindle
This poem is excerpted from Eh, No Talk Li’dat.
Eh, No Talk Li’Dat, an anthology forthcoming from Kaya Press, is centered on Pidgin, or Hawai‘i Creole English. The following poem is excerpted from this anthology.
Pidgin began as a dialect of trade between Native Hawaiians and Western seafarers and merchants and evolved as a Creole language in the sugar plantations in the 1920s and ’30s, yet, until today, it is deemed substandard by school administrators and is not recognized as a Creole language by the State Department of Education. It is the only language I can think of in the U.S. that was co-authored by the various ethnic groups in the islands: Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders (Samoa, Tonga), sugar planters and migrant laborers from Asia (China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines), Portugal (Madeira and the Azores), and Puerto Rico. Recent speakers and innovators of Pidgin include transplants from Micronesia. In addition to the poems, stories, and excerpted plays, all written in Pidgin and contributed by over forty of Hawai‘i’s writers, the genre-defying Eh, No Talk Li’Dat includes archival materials, newspaper articles, transcripts of televised comic skits, and comic strips.
Da Japs, my strange kine relatives,
wen jes bomb Pearl Harba.
Ebery nite from den on, each house
had only one black-out light with
a puka in da center.
People had fo tar dea windows
and craks unda da do-uz
had fo be stuf wid rags,
scolding da lites dat dare fo show up.
If not, da block checkas go come,
jes like termites come aroun da lites.
And those who broke da law,
going hea banging on dea do-uz
and if you one Jap,
you gotta be careful cuz
dey can sen you
to one jail kine camp,
somewea in Colorado.
One nite, one woman wen go into layba
wen was real hot unda the black-out lite.
Into this dark-kine time, one baby wuz born.
Da baby was me. One black-out baby—
nosing aroun in the dark
wid heavy kine eyes,
and a “yellow-belly,”
filled wid one real angry cry!
Juliet S. K. Kono is a poet and fiction writer born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. She is a survivor of the 1946 tsunami. She has written extensively about the Japanese American experience across the generations. Author of four books, including Hilo Rains and Anshu, she is retired and lives with her husband in Honolulu.
The evening of September 30, 1993, I walked into an Austin coffee shop adjacent to the university, sat down with two women who were teaching colleagues, and launched into a discussion of ninth-grade curriculum in the magnet program where we taught. I was in high spirits that evening. Euphoria is the word that comes to mind, a physical state with me—my hands in nonstop motion, words spilling over the table like rapids. At a juncture in the conversation, I happened to glance about—just as a young man at the nearest table flicked his eyes in my direction. “Oops,” I thought, “I’m overdoing it. Need to rein myself in.” But then I glanced again.
I tried to get in touch with my inner knowledge.
Turns out I have no inner knowledge.
I used to think I did.
Could sit on a rock contemplating the frog, the river, the rotisserie chicken
and know that everything is connected to everything else.
Or, that I had a messed-up childhood and never fully left the home.
Or, that abandonment was a product of eating too much candy.
But then the dog saw the squirrel.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.