My mother cuts the outboard motor. Over the slap of waves on the boat’s black pontoon, I hear the fur seals barking. The cliffs are dotted with white albatross. Seals sprawl along the rocky shoreline: gray fur seals with black, rowdy pups, and brown elephant seals beached like massive timbers. Their smell carries across the water, a familiar, testosterone-laden stink, like a mix of musk and onion rings.
I’m facing two stone walruses in a Platz near the death trap,
the death trap a life trap now, there’s no one out.
What do walruses dream under a socialist—now
capitalist—regime? I teem with desire. Teem.
By JEFF McRAE
We scraped the Mississippi
mud off our old piano and father
blew his solos out the open window
and over the meadow
and mother made me strut
with her double-stops, drum sticks
The first line in my bio is the only one that matters: that I am a writer from Abu Dhabi.
There is also my name, which gives away my origins and hints at mud-colored skin.
My name is, however, silent about my life, my distaste for nationhood.
This line is meant to offer pause.
By HALA ALYAN
When the warplanes come, I pluck them
from the blue sky like Tic Tacs. The cupboard
is always full of honey and needles. Merlot and Marlboros.
The rumor of America around my neck.
He was, locals agreed, the quintessential Kaverinagar retiree. In his wool-silk trousers, navy-blue sweater, and plaid scarf wrapped tight about the ears, C. K. Rajgopal, former Air India pilot, cut a lithe figure as he strode down Eighth Main. On his feet he wore the ergonomic shoes his son had brought him from America. Designed for trekking—or for Indian sidewalks, his son had said—the shoes had, for the past weeks, felt heavy, like stones tied to his ankles. But this morning, strangely, it was no longer so. Perhaps his leg muscles had needed time to adjust to their new load, perhaps he was rejuvenated by the winter air—whatever the reason, as he made his way to Wodeyar Lake, past the provisions store and the barbershop, still shuttered at this early hour, past the temple and the sugarcane juice stall, Mr. Rajgopal experienced a lightness, as if the ground were falling away from him and he were floating, gliding, over the pavement stones and under the gulmohars, through clouds of golden dust churned by the municipal workers’ brooms.
Uwi verb
to go back to your residence.
One word, meaning to return,
not just anywhere, but home.
I rode a slow bus out of blackness.
Five a.m. in northern Greece.
The language, blurry and mumbled.
I paid pastel money for a bus
ticket to Ouranopolis whose name
means “City of Heaven.”
By TOM SLEIGH
“Life is not a walk across a field…”—Pasternak
For ten years, Hannah, the world convinced me
that thorn trees, desert, Land Rovers tricked out
with CB radios, machine guns and armor plate,
grew more real the harder it became
to fulfill my nightly promise to rebar and rubble
that some final vowel would reverse time
We were born here so we know how to do. This is the way you walk when you walk. An engine of engines. A glitter of glitter. At the corniche we gather by the sex to watch the constellation of earth. Force and proclivity, tingle and strip, all the whole day is before me. Also, it is not yours.
The departure of myth is something we count—a tickbox for each missing hour. Any memory not capitulated is likely to reform. It is forsaken, this tally. The formation of expatriates requires a mobile constitution, a tendency to ruminate, and general indemnity from causes. A coalition of glass bottles rolling up a hill.
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