I saw a barn owl staring out from a telephone wire
driving down the road with the sky looking
like the edges of the newspaper we crumpled
into balls to light the woodstove
By MARIA JOSEP ESCRIVÀ
Translated by PETER BUSH
Who
Who has ever felt the shock of a brook
being sucked dry by the warm earth?
Who has ever felt the shock of the last
house falling apart in the mountains, mineral
corpse, stone by stone, bone by bone
of each man banished?
By ZACK STRAIT
There were other vehicles moving through the darkness behind us. But we didn’t notice. We forced our bodies into the brambles. We stood on our tiptoes, reached high above our heads like we were greedy for the stars that night. But we craved something attainable, we thought. We thought our need was for the wild summer blackberries. But we were foraging for another memory to sustain us through the evil days to come. And as we ate, the past ripened in clusters for us there among the thorns. I don’t know what my father thought about then, as we filled our bellies with those dark jewels, but I could almost taste my grandmother’s fruit cobbler. The blackberries, I remember, were perfect that night. They were plump and sweet. The juice didn’t stain our fingers or mouths. We ate and ate. How wonderful, how the earth offers such goodness to us without cost. And how awful.
Human systems exist in the mystery
always at the point of spilling
over green, over and over their present containers
of cities and grids and human perception
for what of entanglements, what of catastrophes
what of black holes, of soot from burnt timber
what of seashells, snails, urchins in the pavement
of ancient Greek settlements
By BOB HICOK
Caroline resembled moonlight.
She never appeared when it rained,
made the grass and broken windows
more beautiful, and had me wondering
if our love was waxing or waning.
By MÒNICA BATET
Translated by MARIALENA CARR and JULIA SANCHES
Sometimes this is my story, others it’s not. They used to bring it up at home whenever the room fell silent. They’d talk about her, about a city with a strange name, Sokołowsko. They’d talk about that evening.
There are still pages and pages with tracings of her hands sitting in a drawer. Some are just of hands, while others have words written on the palms or along the fingers. Run away, Get out, Air air, Disappear…. Now and then I place my hand in one of the outlines to see if we have this one thing in common. If, maybe, I too will see all those people someday.
“Happy and furry?” she inquires,
of the TV—
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three,
as she is, with creeping dementia—all
sorts of imponderables float by,
and everything the more inscrutable
if other faculties are failing too…
like hearing, perhaps. A few seconds later,
though, we enjoy a breakthrough,
as our breezy, blow-dried commentator
re-airs his catchphrase, which I move to clarify
by relaying it slowly:
“Happy. And. Free.”
… At day’s end, even so, I might prefer
happy and furry, as though she
might yet retrieve days when all of us were
that peculiar entity, a big family—
father, mother, four boys of various
ages and stages—become, like any true family,
inhabitants of a lair,
wound and bound in a low common smell
(our own must of sweat and hair),
that familial furriness which cordons off a small
walled area while informing a potentially
invasive world, This is us.
Happy and furry. The woman’s five years dead,
yet just last week the phrase returned
as I, watching a YouTube clip, was shepherded
to an obscure nature site by a tag that posed
a teasing test: TRY NOT TO CRY AS MAMA CHIMP
MOURNS BABY. The test? Frankly, I’m not sure I passed.
Embarrassed, as if being watched, I felt
my eyes prickle as the blinking simian—so loving,
so darkly puzzled—stroked and stroked the silky pelt
of a torso strangely limp
whose russet fire still burned,
though warming neither the dead nor the living.
… Furry, then, if not free. We mishear,
misread, we go on misspeaking,
and if our errors pain us, soon they disappear
into an unseen, unseeable, ever-amassing crowd.
Click here. Click. Now. Always, the furious din out there,
and what do our answers count, everything so loud
and larger always than yesterday? We learn to chart
our growth by the billion-, trillion-fold:
Vaster, faster numbers. See me. Click. Give me your heart,
click. Like me…. So many voices, all seeking,
as I suppose both mothers were, the warm, the old,
the furred primordial lair.
Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poetry, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. A former theater critic for Time, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Born in gilded fealty to the state, which was the people’s will,
which was the refined sugar of suffering and indifference,
which was the inherited burden of society, gift of the forefathers.
Bathed in cream, I transmuted hayricks into silk and mirrors.
I ate and destroyed, seeking relief from my depression.
By ANTÒNIA VICENS
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN
Palma, 1978
One day he came, handed me a little box, and said look, look inside. Oh God, what a husband, I was afraid maybe he was losing it, another day it had been look, open this package, and there were more than half a dozen bras with ruffles. I opened the little box and was practically blinded by a stone brighter than the sun. No explanation, nothing, business is coming along, he said. And at night, here we go, trying for an heir, but that wasn’t coming along at all.
Curated by SAM SPRATFORD
This month, our online contributors CHRIS JOHN POOLE, JULES FITZ GERALD, and LAURA NAGLE recommend three inventive, deeply human books with stories that traverse two oceans—from Japan, to Mexico, to Norway.
Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami (trans. Sophie Hughes); recommended by TC Online Contributor Chris John Poole
In her author’s note to This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor writes that “to live in a city is to live among stories.” The city in question is Veracruz, Melchor’s birthplace, a city of cartel violence and political corruption; ritual magic and cold, hard truth. Veracruz’s stories, meanwhile, are those which are gleaned from—and imposed onto—its grim realities.
The stories in This Is Not Miami are crónicas, a genre with no direct equivalent in the Anglophone canon. Crónicas mix reportage and fiction, in a manner akin to gonzo journalism. They favour subjective accounts and firsthand experience over hard data and rigid chronology. Melchor’s crónicas collate rumours, folk myths, and personal narratives, injecting reportage where necessary.
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