Music by ABRAHAM KATZ
Northern Israel-Palestine
The chunk of the ball
On the cracked blacktop
And our torsos so covered
In sweat nearby the sea
Swells and the smell seeps
Into our hair and the air
Single-headed.
Flowering inwardly.
Barely felt in the birth canal.
Medical marketer.
Sick with planet.
By TARA SKURTU
It was the first time I’d lived
with a man, and I wanted him
to translate the name of our street.
He was holding my cold fist
in his own, and we were on
Ofrandei, in the middle of unpaved
Bragadiru, Romania, on our way
home. It’s something you give
to get something—like a sacrifice.
Like what you do for a god.
By MARCUS MYERS
If our bodies are vessels, hers sailed away.
I am sunken eleven months deep, away from her
hazel eyes like aulos pipers for my oarsmen,
away from her
I smell her—
she is in the bed sheets
conjuring aged summers
when popsicles stained
our mouths red,
and the sun colored
our noses black.
You go where you belong, my father says to me,
ten years old, listening at bedtime to his story
about how he once was mugged in Brooklyn
in 1974, a small, polite Canadian
Darkness, my sibling,
I have a story to tell you
Last shabbes I was chased by the law into Bed
Stuy streets for passing out pamphlets
decrying America’s uncles.
The two tall boys, brothers, both
with wire-rimmed glasses, with wicker
creels, fly-fishing gear, and vests
with patches of sheepskin shearling
dotted with troutflies, worked their way
downstream in their rubber waders.
By: ALISON PRINE
The opposite of losing you
was watching you across the purple light
of the dance floor in the local gay bar
while the salt trucks dragged through the streets.