Southwest Ohio
Cute, I said bending over, a salam—
I swallowed the second half of the word
as my face drew nearer to the shiny body
and I saw the white oozing from its mouth, but
it was too late.
My daughter was already rushing over,
What is that little guy?
I stood, tried pivoting,
a bit dizzy from the way the thing
lay there still
moving one of its tiny arms, I looked at Kayla
and said in Hebrew, which we both speak thanks to
Shinjuku Golden Gai came to my attention during the pandemic months in Tokyo. On those quiet stay-at-home evenings, I watched the Japanese TV series “Midnight Diner” on Netflix, and the Diner’s location was set in Golden Gai, a tiny nightlife quarter that was once an illegal prostitution district in Shinjuku, a town in Tokyo, after World War II. Each self-contained half-hour episode of the show revolved around a customer who always ordered the same food at the hole-in-the-wall Diner run by “Master,” a mysterious middle-aged man with a scarred face. The Diner’s regulars, crammed at the U-shaped counter, ranged from corporate employees and detectives to strippers and gangsters. At the end of the day, these customers walked through the alleyways where electric signs of bars and restaurants jutted into the air, opened the Diner’s sliding door and said, “Master, my usual, please.” The show brought these characters a little closer to me through the foods they ordered. Octopus-shaped red weenies, bite-sized fried chicken, ground meat cutlets served with macaroni salad and finely-sliced cabbage—conventional home-style dishes I ate while growing up.
By D.S. WALDMAN
Kentucky, United States
64-West
After Calvino
When you ride a long time in the private
night of your pickup cab
you enter eventually
into a desire you cannot name a greater dark
that wants only what
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.
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